One tricky thing here is that existing literature is really examining the potential effects of trigger warnings in and of themselves, devoid of context or non-immediate decision making. Does seeing a literal trigger warning make someone feel less anxious? Almost certainly not, why on earth would it?

In studies that find no or slight negative effect, the outcomes are immediate measures. How do you feel right now? If it assesses decision making, it’s whether you do or do not immediately consume the content.

But for trauma survivors the potential to be triggered is always in flux, always dependent on everything else going on in your life, often set off by things that seem unrelated or irrational. Trigger warnings give someone a choice in that exact moment for what to do based on what they believe they can* manage. Yes, it may promote avoidance, but avoidance can increase feelings of agency that allow for reduced avoidance behavior in the future.

As an example from the great college campus syllabus trigger warning kerfuffle: I assign chapters from Durkheim’s Suicide in some seminars, as well as complementary readings with less obvious titles. My students get a warning about this ahead of time, but they don’t get to just skip that part of the class. Some things students have done: scheduled extra therapy sessions during those weeks, read in small groups in the library instead of isolated in dorm rooms, missed a class meeting and made up for it with office hours and a short additional assignment (so they didn’t out themselves to their peers with a panic attack in class). It’s about agency and self-assessment.

A screen with a suicide hotline number isn’t going to magically make someone ok with seeing suicide represented, but it offers an action the person can take to regain agency.

*Or just want to manage. Sometimes you’re just living your life and not super in the mood for exposure therapy, and if you can get your brain somewhere else for a while that’s a very good thing.

FWIW, academia is utterly dominated by Macs. In the last 10 years I have known exactly one colleague to choose to use a PC, and her open reason for doing that is that she thinks it’s fun to be contrarian. A lot of (psychology) labs will have one dusty PC stashed away in a corner somewhere running that one weird piece of Windows-only proprietary software for the eye-tracker or a super niche stats program or something, but then you make IT come in to keep it alive because the idea of having to put any effort into using it or replacing it is horrible.

I was a little curious whether losing the ability to BootCamp (the new M chips can’t, and I personally used dual booting all the time for video games) would change anything, but my university’s response was to start paying for Parallels for anyone who wants it.

I really didn’t understand why people still acted like anybody at all uses Windows until my husband moved from academia to industry a few years ago and we were totally floored by the PC-culture (heh) he found himself in (though he’s personally pretty anti-Mac and not complaining). Now the only Mac he sees is mine and the only PC I see is his. It’s wild.

I use this example to introduce formal and functional approaches to topics in the social sciences. Any argument you try to make within the debate ends up including a variant of “…because sandwiches [abstraction about what formally defines a sandwich]”, which itself presumes that the “right” way to carve up the world is in categories of form. You could also conceive of sandwiches functionally, where something isn’t a sandwich if we (some cultural or linguistic group) just don’t think of them that way.

From a functional view, the very fact the debate exists at all means hot dogs aren’t sandwiches, cereal isn’t soup, pop tarts aren’t ravioli, etc.

Then I make them think about it in contexts like language, Durkheim, and policy making and watch their little minds explode.

Yeah it’s got a reputation for exactly this. It’s a terrible movie, but the ending is a completely stupid and unearned tearjerker.

Click.

I absolutely consider Phantom Tollbooth a masterpiece. There’s nothing else like it, and it has extraordinary persistence.

I really wasn’t attracted to my now husband at all when we met. I remember also really disliking his smell (not BO, just regular pheromones or whatever).

11 years later we are extremely happily married and he’s sexy as fuck. His appearance hasn’t changed (except that he’s actually a little overweight now and looks a decade older) but every day he’s just hotter and hotter. Not like a “I just love him so much on the inside.” Like I genuinely perceive him to be extremely physically attractive (and equally good to smell) and look back on early days with complete confusion.

n=1 so grain of salt and whatnot, but I’d say if you’re vibing enough to make this a question worth asking then it’s probably worth giving it a shot to see if attraction develops

Edit: Please don’t actually tell them you’re not attracted to them though. That’s weird and unnecessary. You don’t need to lie either, just don’t comment on their appearance until/unless you start to notice those little things that have grown on you.

Also: stopcockstopcock stop. Cock. Stopcock

Very handy and widely applicable.

Though you’d lose the equally useful “pop pop”.

I mean, GPT 3.5 consistently quotes my dissertation and conference papers back to me when I ask it anything related to my (extremely niche, but still) research interests. It’s definitely had access to plenty of publications for a while without managing to make any sense of them.

Alternatively, and probably more likely, my papers are incoherent and it’s not GPT’s fault. If 8.0 gets tenure track maybe it will learn to ignore desperate ramblings of PhD students. Once 9.0 gets tenured though I assume it will only reference itself.