Trigger warnings are primarily intended to help people who have experienced traumatic events, such as rape. The Harvard study did not include any people who self-reported an experience of trauma, which cast doubt on how widely it could be applied to all college students. A more recent study addressed that limitation but achieved essentially the same results. Participants who were warned that they were about to watch graphic footage or read a graphic story felt just as badly as those who weren’t warned. They had a similar number of intrusive thoughts afterward. Seeing a trigger warning only slightly decreased the participants’ attempts to avoid thinking about the graphic material.

This finding—that trigger warnings made practically no difference for any of these symptoms—was true even for participants who had a history of trauma, including subjects whose type of trauma matched the nature of the content they watched. “These analyses suggest trigger warnings have trivial effects even among people for whom such warnings may be specifically intended,” the study’s authors find.

The authors argue that their research should condemn trigger warnings to the dustbin of wokeness history. They write that though it might seem like their results suggest there’s no harm in keeping the warnings, they nevertheless worry that the warnings’ widespread adoption could be part of what’s hurting college students’ mental health. “College students are increasingly anxious … and widespread adoption of trigger warnings in syllabi may promote this trend, tacitly encouraging students to turn to avoidance, thereby depriving them of opportunities to learn healthier ways to manage potential distress,” they write.

In an interview with Inside Higher Education, the study’s lead author, Mevagh Sanson, a postdoctoral research fellow in psychology at New Zealand’s University of Waikato, put it bluntly: “Trigger warnings don’t help.”

Payton Jones, a co-author of the 2018 trigger-warnings paper, also told me that he would be hesitant to use the warnings as a professor because there is so little evidence that they help anyone. Signaling to trauma survivors that you’re helping them when you’re actually not can be “invalidating,” he said. “It’s crazy that trigger warnings have spread so far before a single study had come out evaluating them.”

Meanwhile, some professors don’t feel that this research calls for an end to the use of trigger warnings. Gust still sees a benefit; they consider the warnings to be like a font that helps dyslexic people read. “They can be used to help with accessibility ... they help students suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder to access material that has a strong likelihood of triggering a mental-health crisis,” they told me. They also like that trigger warnings signal to their students that people come from different walks of life.