OP-ED: Trigger warnings don’t protect students, they make education worse

Brock Schnurr writes, “There was no clear evidence that trigger warnings help psychologically vulnerable people manage their mental state. Nor do they improve learning.”

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Author: Brock Schnurr

Brock Schnurr is an Owen Sound, Ontario-born author, essayist and educator currently based in Singapore, and a regular contributor to C2C Journal.

It is easy to understand the desire to help those who are vulnerable or weaker than ourselves. Those with PTSD, for example, go through their days with a heavier burden than the rest of us. So when educators encounter material that might remind a traumatized student of a traumatic experience, why not provide a warning?

Good intentions, however, are not evidence. If a practice is supposed to protect vulnerable students, we should ask a simple question: does it work?

A trigger warning is supposed to do three things. First, it is meant to be addressed to people considered particularly vulnerable. Second, it should alert them to an impending threat in the form of potentially distressing content. Third, it is supposed to benefit them. A warning that a film contains depictions of domestic violence, for example, is intended to help a psychologically vulnerable person prepare for, or avoid, what is coming.

Proponents generally offer three arguments in favour of trigger or content warnings, which can be distilled down to: avoidance, coping and learning. The first claims that warnings allow vulnerable people to opt out of difficult material. More commonly, proponents claim warnings reduce harm by enabling previously traumatized people to prepare and then apply coping techniques. Once that takes effect, the vulnerable student can continue engaging with difficult material, thereby improving their own learning.

These are, at first glance, reasonable hypotheses. Is there evidence to support them? There is not; none at all.

A 2023 meta-analysis by Victoria Bridgland and colleagues reviewed 12 peer-reviewed articles covering 24 individual studies. Eleven of the 12 articles concluded that warnings are ineffective at all their proposed goals (the 12^th was equivocal).

There was no clear evidence that trigger warnings help psychologically vulnerable people manage their mental state. Nor do they improve learning. And even the avoidance argument went out the window with the finding that warnings produce a “forbidden fruit” effect, prompting more engagement with ostensibly risky content. The only obvious effect of trigger warnings was negative: they reliably increase “anticipatory” distress before the person even encountered the material.

In other words, the best science we have has concluded that trigger warnings do not help people cope, learn or avoid potentially risky content. They do, however, make some people pre-emptively uncomfortable. This is not a case where the evidence is evenly divided. The findings of different research teams working at different times and places all point in the same direction.

There is another cost: rigger warnings poison our interactions with art. A 2025 study also co-authored by Bridgland found that warnings “substantially increased all negative emotions (and decreased all positive emotions) in response to art,” thereby decreasing aesthetic appreciation. That trigger-warnings degrade our experience of what should be an accessible good and a source of personal enrichment is distressing, though not particularly surprising.

Trigger warnings are a symptom as well as a component of the wider crisis of the degradation of education throughout Western countries, very much including Canada.

Their history is revealing. They emerged sometime in the late 1990s among online communities discussing trauma, where they began as a self-help measure. Their big moment came in 2014, when the student senate of the University of California Santa Barbara passed a motion urging instructors to use them. Within two years, half of American college instructors reported having used trigger warnings. The practice had also made its way to Canada.

But when UCSB’s student representatives called for their routine employment, there existed no credible evidence that they even worked. The earliest paper cited in the later meta-analysis appeared in 2018—four years after these California students appointed themselves mental health experts.

This is worth emphasizing. Trigger warnings did not spread because an authoritative scientific study had demonstrated their efficacy and was later overturned. There was no retracted paper, no discredited science and no made-up statistics to explain their adoption. There was never any research to support this pedagogical practice to begin with—not even fraudulent research!

Trigger warnings instead spread through activism and endlessly repeated assertion. Their defenders appealed primarily to our desire to help the vulnerable. At best, they could offer anecdotes or self-reports. The problem is not that educators wanted to do good. The problem is that they adopted a practice before establishing that it actually did good.

Education is not supposed to be comfortable, nor should it be easy. It is a training ground for our minds and characters. Difficult books, disturbing works of art and challenging ideas are not defects to be eliminated from education. Often, they are precisely what education is for.

Good intentions deserve at least initial respect. But educational practices should be judged by what they accomplish, not by how compassionate they sound. The path to the stars is one beset by difficulties.

How trigger warnings fit into the broader crisis of education I alluded to above, who is driving this crisis and how it spread, will be the subject of my next column.

The original, full-length essay upon which this column was based, by Renaud-Philippe Garner, was recently published in C2C Journal.