Content warnings, or the much more politically loaded term “trigger warnings,” are meant to let people who have experienced some rough stuff in life know what they’re getting into before they, say, read a feature article or watch a particularly rough episode of a show. They’re just a simple heads-up, giving people the chance to opt out so they don’t have to relive a horror that they’re not yet ready to relive.
A new study found that most people choose not to opt out after reading a trigger warning. In fact, these warnings might actually be attracting more people than they’re repelling.
According to a new study published in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, researchers found that 90 percent of people still click on content they have been warned about. They didn’t do it because they felt ready to face it, but because they were curious.
Oh, there’s a trigger warning on this thing. It must be salacious. It must be scary. It must be harrowing. I have to see it. People are moths, and trigger warnings are the flame.
Trigger Warnings Actually Make You More Likely to Be Triggered
Victoria Bridgland, the study’s lead author and a psychologist from Flinders University, calls it the “forbidden fruit effect.” Essentially, when we’re told not to look, we want to look even more. Most trigger warnings keep their language vague so as not to be triggering themselves. Phrases like “sensitive content ahead” and “may be disturbing” tend to ramp up people’s curiosity.
The lack of specifics creates a vacuum that our brains immediately rush to fill with worst-case scenarios, so we then click on the article or turn on that episode with a kind of morbid fascination, all the while wondering (maybe even hoping) that the thing we were warned about lives up to expectations.
Here’s the even stranger part: even people with PTSD, anxiety, and depression weren’t any more likely to avoid the content than anyone else. Which raises the question: if these warnings aren’t protecting the people they’re supposedly for, then who are they really for?
In a statement about the study’s findings released on Flinders University’s website, Bridgland says that “Trigger warnings might not be overtly harmful, but they also might not be helping in the way we think they are.”
She doesn’t offer solutions or a potential better replacement. Still, Bridgland does say that social media companies, and likely society as a whole, should “explore more effective interventions that genuinely support people’s well-being.”
In a sense, trigger warnings, content warnings, whatever you want to call them, feel no different than a movie rating system. It’s nice to go into something with a general idea of whether it’s appropriate for some audiences.
There might be plenty of room for improvement. Still, the core idea is, especially in social media environments, where in one scroll you can see the funniest thing you’ll see all day, and in the next scroll you will see the most horrifying video you’ll ever see in your entire life.
You didn’t ask to see that. You didn’t want to see that. It probably would’ve been nice to have been warned about it ahead of time.
It would probably have been even better if social media companies, or anyone else at this point, were better at moderating their content. So it wasn’t so much of a Wild West with fresh new Hells lurking around every corner.
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