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At the very point that countries such as India and China are increasingly nationalistic and are increasingly inculcating their youth with militaristic and nationalistic values [Is the BJP altering textbooks to promote Hindu nationalism? By Murali Krishnan, DW, 25th May 2022], we are infantilising our own people. The newly published The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic Mental Illness, by New York University’s Jonathan Haidt, finds that Generation Z essentially suffer from arrested development. They are super-cautious — they lose their virginity later, learn to drive later, move out later, are less likely to drink, and even become anxious when they must order food in restaurants — because they have been served and mollycoddled all of their lives. There is no more obvious example of this nurse-maiding than “Trigger-warnings.” And the worst thing is that research has found that they don’t actually work.
Trigger-warnings have become so widespread in recent decades that they moved far beyond warning television viewers that “the following report contains scenes which some viewers may find upsetting.” Viewers must now be specifically told that the report contains the pixelated image of a “dead body,” or that a movie includes scenes of, or even discussions, of “suicide.” This ruined an episode of the Korean series Squid Game for me, because it told me how it would end.
Such warnings are also tailored to specific groups, as in: “This article discusses sexual assault. If you are a survivor of sexual misconduct, BYU has extensive resources to help.” Some of them even advise you on what action to take: “If you do not wish to view these works, you may exit through the video gallery at right” [see, A Meta-Analysis of the Efficacy of Trigger Warnings, Content Warnings, and Content Notes, By Victoria Bridgman et al., Clinical Psychological Science, 2023]
Novels now require trigger warnings, because they were written many decades ago, and therefore reflect unacceptable attitudes which may deeply traumatise overindulged modern readers. The British 1924 novel A Passage to India, about colonial life under the Raj, requires a trigger warning, in its US edition, due to “offensive” language and “attitudes of this time” [Trigger warning added to EM Forster’s A Passage to India by US publisher, By Craig Simpson, The Telegraph, August 19, 2023]. Gone With the Wind, similarly, requires a trigger warning, due to its “harmful . . . racist and stereotypical descriptions” [Gone with the Wind is slapped with trigger warning by its own publisher . . ., By Stewart Carr, Mail Online, April 2, 2023].
But do trigger warnings actually work? Do they really psychologically prepare people for something that they might find upsetting and, in doing so, reduce the extent to which they get upset? According to a recently published meta-analysis of the studies on this the answer is, “No. They don’t.” If anything, they make things worse. So, really, they do little more than contribute to a culture of hypersensitivity where trigger-warnings become ever more ubiquitous due to a competitive desire to seem sensitive by including them ever more frequently.
The study — A Meta-Analysis of the Efficacy of Trigger Warnings, Content Warnings, and Content Notes — published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science in August last year should be sobering reading to those who increasingly insist on placing “trigger warnings” on just about everything. The meta-analysis of previous studies on trigger-warnings, led by Victoria Bridgland of Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, really does need to be widely read among broadcasters and publishers.
Advocates for trigger warnings argue that they help people to psychologically prepare for emotionally difficult material — to “brace themselves” — such that they respond less strongly to it. This is known as “Response Effect.” However, according to their results, studies on this matter, overall, find that the trigger warnings have no discernible “response effect.” They do not reduce a person’s negative feelings in response to that which it is assumed may trigger them. The authors summarise:
“A total of 86 effect sizes across nine articles measured the effect of trigger warnings on affective response to material presented after the warning. Effects were coded such that a greater effect size signified that warnings increased negative affect (e.g., distress, fear, anxiety) relative to the control condition. Overall, our random-effects omnibus analysis suggested that warnings had a trivial effect on response affect.”
The authors suggest that the warnings don’t work in the desired way because most people simply aren’t very good at emotional preparation. They need to be given techniques via which they might prepare themselves emotionally; not simply be told that they should do so.
Another supposed purpose of trigger warnings is “avoidance.” If sensitive people are informed that something triggering is about to appear than they can look away from the screen or leave the room. However, the meta-analysis found that people simply don’t do this to any significant degree: “. . . warnings had a negligible effect on avoidance.”
In fact, trigger warnings can induce the opposite effect. The warning makes people more interested in watching the “triggering” content, presumably because they are attracted to the sensational and to the slightly forbidden. In one study:
“Rather than randomizing to a single-warning or no-warning condition, in this study, participants were asked to choose between four article titles, two with trigger warnings and two without. Although this experimental strategy was distinct, standard mean differences could still be computed between participants who received a warning for Article A vs. no warning for Article A and so forth. Bruce and Roberts (2020) found that a given article was selected more often when it carried a warning (a decrease in avoidance).”
According to the authors: “These findings likely reflect the Pandora effect, which suggests that people have a general tendency to approach rather than avoid stimuli that has been marked aversive and uncertain.”
“Anticipatory Effect” is the idea that the warning itself will increase your distress: You will become distressed after hearing the warning but before viewing the triggering content. If this is what happens, then trigger warnings are worse than pointless. They simply upset people who are already prone to easily becoming upset. This is exactly what the authors found: “. . . warnings increased anticipatory affect, with effects ranging from very small to medium to large.”
Finally, the authors discovered that warnings have no impact on people’s comprehension of the triggering material. Warnings are supposed to foster a “safe space” in which trauma survivors, for example, can prepare for distressing material, thus improving educational outcomes for them. However, the warnings don’t achieve this. They have zero impact on comprehension.
So what is the ultimate conclusion of this meta-analysis? Nobody could put it better than the authors, who are refreshingly direct for academics making their way through such a political minefield:
“Existing research on content warnings, content notes, and trigger warnings suggests that they are fruitless, although they do reliably induce a period of uncomfortable anticipation.”
In other words, they are worse than useless; they induce anxiety in people; they contribute to the culture of anxiety that Jonathan Haidt sets out in The Anxious Generation. This being so, “trigger warnings” are really just virtue-signalling. They are a way of signalling, and competitively signalling as they spread, to the Woke mob that you, too, are concerned about sensitivity and feelings and you are submissive to the mob’s demands.
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Trigger warnings are for pussies.
Your article should have been prefaced by a trigger warning to any normies who might have wandered in expecting an article about Roy Rogers’ horse (Trigger, for those too young to remember):
This article contains ideas which some readers may find anxiety-producing. It includes statements about Generation Z that are stereotypical and have been widely debunked in the Washington Post, the New York Times and other mainstream media. If you are a survivor of misinformation, or do not wish to be upset by generationist speech, you can protect yourself by clicking away immediately before setting eyes on this hateful material. In addition, you may be eligible for free psychological counseling from your state, county or college Office of Mental Health.
What if the rise in anxiety among teens and twenty-somethings is due to the Great Awokening? There might not be anything inherent in social media or smartphones that induce anxiety, but they nonetheless made impressionable younger users more anxious beginning in the early 2010s because of the political and cultural craziness promoted by our American elites online. The Great Awokening was a historical fad that ended recently, so maybe mental health will make a comeback. Twenty-seven year olds will have an easier time ordering a bite to eat inside the restaurant.
Yeah ok, we all now know that trigger warning don’t work because several people did a study and yes Western people have prolonged childhoods but really who…cares because we all knew that already!
People who read articles on Unz Review, from the beginning of this trigger warning mania knew that this whole idea was silly, stupid, and potentially dangerous (not to the readers made anxious but to us the UR crowd).
Thus if some people are made anxious by reading about Jim in Huckleberry Finn, they are either virtue-signaling or have major psych problems in their lives. Again, we all knew that at the very beginning.
The same goes for editors putting in the trigger warnings-they are virtue signaling and adopting a holier-than-thou attitude which, at the very least, is extremely annoying to UR readers and, at the very most, serves to warn UR readers that in out there in the big wide world, there are many people who just plain hate us and want us gone. We all knew than even before Ed wrote this.
So why did Dutton write this article? Let me speculate- reading Dutton there is a lot of we can take to heart but Dutton has a major weakness that makes him actually closer to the blue haired harridans he pretends to despise than to most of us.
He is extremely concerned about gaining acceptance with the crowd he chose to associate with. As such, he cites loads and loads and LOADS of social research literature as a way of impressing us with his erudite knowledge hoping that we will accept him as our intellectual overlord.
Goody for him but we are crowd he is trying to impress and the problem is…WE ALL KNOW THIS! and WE DON’T CARE! That’s why we read UR because we know the world is crazy, we don’t need somebody to cite psych lit as proof-just reading the media is proof enough.
Really, who gives a f… about what someone called Victoria Bridgland of Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia found and…
the Response Effect and…
the Pandora Effect and…
the Anticipatory Effect and the ….
Look at it from the opposite point of view: what if Dutton found that a meta-analysis of psych research found that trigger warnings actually HELP to reduce anxiety while reading old literature?
Does that mean Dutton would endorse trigger warnings and we should too?
On the contrary, most of UR readers would just say; Who cares? Reading old literature should CREATE ANXIETY, anxiety is GOOD in perceiving how the world works. Also, that some editor somewhere spend time writing a trigger warning is evidence that our current society is stupid and decadent.
Dutton by citing psych lit that trigger warnings don’t work and are actually detrimental is just playing into the game.
Meta-analyzing trigger warnings means that it is an important issue. It might be an important issue to our liberal academic, political, and cultural elite but certainly not to us.
We don’t give a rat’s a.. and this whole issue is just a way of the elite asserting it’s dominance over society and us.
That’s what Ed should have written instead of throwing some Brigland idiot from Adelaide at us and carefully explaining what the “Pandora Effect” is (Pandora Effect?-I lived five decades without knowing what that is and now I know but I don’t give a f…).
Why does Edward Dutton fail to see that a trigger warning is not a security blanket for the weak and the cowardly but is instead, first and foremost, a preemptive strike at the reader’s or viewer’s thought processes? Preemption is especially vital when the reader or viewer is young; that is to say, when the resistance of his indoctrination to anything that runs counter to the Narrative has not yet become second nature.
The past is a foreign country, and its thought and literature, even more so its movies, are riddled with people, ideas, attitudes, and underlying assumptions that (((our masters))) have declared doubleplusungood. Enter the trigger warning, which acts to short-circuit the young mind’s natural tendency to give the material presented to it a chance to make a case for itself.
Jonathan Haidt is, I suggest, a liar. He knows that Generation Z’s problem is not arrested development brought on by mollycoddling. He knows, rather, that mollycoddling is a core component of the brainwashing process that Gen Z has experienced since it was in its collective cradle. The true problem is a side-effect of this brainwashing process, which has been so successful that its victims no longer appear able to respond with individual agency in even those few remaining situations where the Jews need them to act in a manner that at least mimics intellectual and moral independence. This undesired, unexpected side-effect seems to have left Haidt feeling that weeping is his sole recourse.
In short, this essay is a solemn, unironic reflection on a liar’s crocodile tears. Given that Dutton seems to think that early loss of one’s virginity is a positive marker for a society, I cannot say I am surprised, however disappointed I may be.
Dutton is well-aware that losing one’s virginity early is an r-selected trait.
But having children too late causes them to have genetic problems – likewise if you’re having them too young.
(Ages of both parents contribute to that.)
It’s all about finding the Goldilocks Equilibrium.
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Gen Z (and Millennials, even) aren’t having sex (and some, not even losing their virginities) because of what Society and Culture turned into: they’ve given up. The Japanese call that: “hikikomori” and “herbivore man”.
In the past, say, Victorian Era (amongst many other periods), people would lose their virginities rather EARLY: but always within MARRIAGE.
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Fun Fact: one’s ‘first intercourse’ is called “coitarche”.
Egalitarianism must erase the difference between the prostitute and the wife. Everyone is identical, therefore losing your virginity to a whore must be identical to losing your virginity on the nuptial bed. Not to mention other variations on losing one’s virginity…
One contributing factor is the parent generation who due to feelings of insignificance and meaninglessness in our cold, hectic, impersonal and crowded world chose to live vicariously through their children. Nothing can be too good for their kids, and god forbid that anything bad would happen to them and they might have to learn some of life’s harder lessons. 24/7 pampering of the little narcissist would be the only option, this bubble wrapping is just a logical continuation of that process – the new untouchables.
I would think avoiding triggering material would make an individual more sensitive to being triggered and have a worse reaction.
It is not mollycoddling that has produced the mass anxiety of Gen Z, it is the relentless toxic assault on their brains by the massive, reckless childhood vaccine schedule and the toxic standard diet of processed foods that are now their main source of “nutrition.”
I think you should add social media to that as well.