Psychologist goes through a meta-analysis that’s been done about the efficacy of trigger warnings. Seems like they have a bit of an axe to grind about their… horror writing career(?) but thought it was interesting. Thoughts?
Psychologist goes through a meta-analysis that’s been done about the efficacy of trigger warnings. Seems like they have a bit of an axe to grind about their… horror writing career(?) but thought it was interesting. Thoughts?
This shit sucks. It’s railroading the intended use of content warnings into something impossible, and then dismissing that people can or do use them in any other way. It assumes the purpose of avoiding triggers is to be therapeutic treatment for those triggers, and then calls content warnings pointless when they can’t deliver that on their own. It’s ignoring the use of content warnings to lessen the harmful impact of triggers, or their use together with other therapeutic treatment.
She cites studies comparing the reaction to triggering content with or without a warning and says it isn’t helpful, but what about when they actually serve their purpose? When people choose not to view content based on the warnings? She says she doesn’t do that, and then dismisses that anyone ever would. I do that all the time. I’m pretty sure other people on this site do as well. That’s not her experience, and it doesn’t support her point, so she doesn’t care. The study she cites on avoidance seems to be treating the total number of eyes on a graphic image as a measure of the effectiveness of warnings, and assuming the images would be equally distressing to all people. From what she presented, it doesn’t consider that the people can have vastly different reactions to the content, and the ones who opted out of seeing the images could be extremely affected by them, while the ones who opted in may be unaffected.
She assumes that the goal of content warnings is to avoid 100% of exposure to triggering content, which is obviously impossible and she uses that makes them sound ridiculous and naive. Then she assumes that warnings will be successful in blocking out 100% of content, and is concerned that people won’t be able to get better at responding to their triggers without exposure, ignoring that people can be selective about when it would be helpful to engage with triggering content.
Her viewpoint sounds nice when she frames it as “the importance of radical acceptance”. When that becomes “in real life, staying away from triggering things is only going to make you very fragile” and then she spends much of the video talking about virtue signaling and cancel culture, it’s clear this is just the classic conservative “toughen up, snowflake” driving a misrepresentation of content warnings.
Edit: This video is basically equivalent to claiming that labeling foods that contain peanuts doesn’t work because