These results suggest a trigger warning is neither meaningfully helpful nor harmful.

Initial research confirms common sense. In early 2012, we began hearing from postmodernist, social justice progressives about the need for trigger warnings. The original context was usually with regard to violence - the proposition was that students in school who might have suffered rape of some other physical trauma ought to be warned by professors in advance of a lecture or reading which might be tangentially related so that the student could skip the class or psychologically prepare themselves for the discussion/reading. The argument was that talking about emotionally unsettling traumas could trigger post traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD).

All this dovetailed with the effort to make the argument that there was a campus rape culture (despite what the empirical evidence suggests which is that women are at greater risk outside of school than on campus.) There is a reasonable correlation between the rise in the use of the term "trigger warning" and the rise in the use of the term "rape culture."

Like so many social justice ploys, the argument about trigger warnings had the aura of reasonableness. Nobody wishes to inflict emotional disstress.

My parents made this point to me circa 1970. We were living in Sweden and they had a party at home with many guests, a mix of a few Americans, some Swedes, and many European expatriates who lived in Stockholm. Among the Americans was a young couple recently transferred from the US, he being a midlevel executive for an American multinational. Pleasant people. But unaccustomed to a non-American environment.

At some point in the evening, in a jocular fashion, in the context of making the point of his deference to his wife's decision-making at home, he referred to her as the Gestapo - the person in charge. It passed without incident.

It was the clumsy faux pas made by someone without context or thinking. Afterwards, my parents pointed out to we children that among those at the party there were a handful who had been prisoners of the Gestapo, and several others whose countries had been occupied during the war. For Americans, 25 years after the war, it was ancient and distant history. For Europeans it was near and real. Their point was that he was too clumsy and unaware without intentionally being callous - that you always need to be aware of context and avoid casually raising topics that might cause distress.

Fair enough. We are all ignorant and unaware to a degree. If you interact, you always risk accidental social missteps. But as long as everyone is of goodwill and generous in nature, everything works out. And social interaction is desirable. You don't want to kill it for fear of accidentally insulting someone.

So the general idea of "trigger warnings" resonated because normal people don't want to hurt or cause distress.

But the social justice jacobins are always about power, not about being nice. If they can force the acceptance of trigger warnings, they then have a tool for controlling speech. It is Rule No. 4 in Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals.

Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.

So if you want to control speech, which jacobins do, you present a reasonable rule (trigger warnings). Once everyone is feeling warm and fuzzy about being respectful, you then bring Rule No. 4 into play by expanding the definition of distress.

Which is exactly what happened. First it was that we needed trigger warnings for those who had suffered abuse, rape, or trauma and to avoid triggering episodes of PTSD.

Even then, the premise, while theoretically plausible, was tissue then. PTSD is very specific and not just about being upset about something. Additionally, human adaptability is hugely variant - what is a trauma to some is water off the back of others. The number of people who could potentially suffer PTSD is far greater than the number who do. And as to what can trigger a PTSD episode; well, that is even more variant.

So plausibility masked the concrete reality of how many people suffer what types of PTSD under what circumstances. It became a self-defining criteria. From there it was a short step to what we have subsequently seen. Ideas are violent. Words are violent. We cannot have people on campus who say things with which we disagree and don't like. Even if they are true arguments. Campus became a haven for suppressing ideas and speech rather than learning and seeking truth. The clammy hand of censorship was enabled through the whole notion of trigger warnings.

It was all nonsense and yet was a hugely effective strategy. Everyone in academia and mainstream media climber aboard.

It wakes awhile but eventually we do get around to reality. The gods of the copybook headings are always lurking somewhere in the shadows and will seek obedience.

From Trigger Warnings Are Trivially Helpful at Reducing Negative Affect, Intrusive Thoughts, and Avoidance by Mevagh Sanson, Deryn Strange, and Maryanne Garry. From the Abstract.

Students are requesting and professors issuing trigger warnings—content warnings cautioning that college course material may cause distress. Trigger warnings are meant to alleviate distress students may otherwise experience, but multiple lines of research suggest trigger warnings could either increase or decrease symptoms of distress. We examined how these theories translate to this applied situation. Across six experiments, we gave some college students and Internet users a trigger warning but not others, exposed everyone to one of a variety of negative materials, then measured symptoms of distress. To better estimate trigger warnings’ effects, we conducted mini meta-analyses on our data, revealing trigger warnings had trivial effects—people reported similar levels of negative affect, intrusions, and avoidance regardless of whether they had received a trigger warning. Moreover, these patterns were similar among people with a history of trauma. These results suggest a trigger warning is neither meaningfully helpful nor harmful.

The usual caveats: unrepresentative sample (college students), small sample size (though bigger than most at 1,394), experimental rather than observed, etc.

But it is structured research and it does bear out the commons sense supposition that trigger warnings are not effective. It is particularly notable that the responses to stressful materials was the same between those with and without prior trauma. We'll have to await replications but hopefully, over the next few years or sooner, we can get rid of this pernicious nonsense and go back to relying on professors to show some modicum of social awareness.

And hopefully we can eventually turn the tide on jacobins trying to suppress speech and ideas that challenge their fantasy worldview.