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STUDY: Trigger Warnings Are Harmful To College Students\xa0says the Daily Wire, describing a study whose participants\u2019 average age was 37 and which did not measure harm.

You can find the study involved\xa0here. A group of Harvard scientists asked 370 people on Mechanical Turk to read some disturbing passages \u2013 for example, a graphic murder scene from\xa0Crime and Punishment. Half the participants received the following trigger warning before the passage:

TRIGGER WARNING: The passage you are about to read contains disturbing content and may trigger an anxiety response, especially in those who have a history of trauma

Participants were asked to rate their anxiety before and after reading the passages. After they had finished, they were asked to fill out a bunch of questionnaires that measured their opinions about how trauma worked.

The researchers found that people who received the trigger warning were 5% more likely to endorse the idea that they were vulnerable to trauma, and also 5% more likely to endorse the belief that people with trauma could suffer persistent negative effects from that trauma. There were some subgroup and moderation analyses which I ignore for the usual reasons.

What might be some causes for concern with this study?

First, Stuart Ritchie\xa0points out\xa0that the results are statistically weak. Most of the results have p-values around 0.05, and are not corrected for multiple testing. That means it hasn\u2019t been formally proven whether or not the results are random chance. I don\u2019t like haggling over whether something is just above or just below a significance threshold. But if you do like that kind of haggling, this study doesn\u2019t survive it very well.