The Coddling of the Cornellian Mind

The Tragic Consequences of Good Intentions

Trigger warnings were proposed as a means to protect students with PTSD. Not only do they fail to do that, but they undermine the resilience of all Cornellians and risk encouraging cognitive distortions commonly observed in mentally ill patients. 

Trigger Warnings as a Treatment for PTSD

Let us first confront the question of whether trigger warnings do the job they are alleged to do – that is, protect students with PTSD from reexperiencing traumatic experiences. In a recent study conducted at Harvard University, researchers found “no evidence that trigger warnings were helpful for trauma survivors, for participants who self-reported a posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) diagnosis, or for participants who qualified for probable PTSD, even when the survivors’ trauma matched the passages’ content.” 

In fact, the researchers found substantial evidence to support the opposite conclusion:  “…trigger warnings countertherapeutically reinforce survivors’ view of their trauma as central to their identity.” According to Richard McNally, the professor who led the study, “Trigger warnings are counter-therapeutic because they encourage avoidance of reminders of trauma, and avoidance maintains PTSD.” In other words, avoiding triggers is a symptom and exacerbator of PTSD, not a treatment for it. 

Thus, it is clear from the outset that trigger warnings are ineffective at helping PTSD patients. They may even do harm. If your therapist tells you to start avoiding your triggers, get a new therapist. 

Trigger Warnings as an Ideology 

Trigger warnings undermine the resilience not only of people who struggle with PTSD, but of the entire community.

A particularly instructive book is The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure. In the book, First Amendment lawyer Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt identify three “Great Untruths” and argue that, despite good intentions, they are harming students. They are The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings; and The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

In order to be considered a Great Untruth, an idea must meet the following three criteria: it contradicts ancient wisdom, it contradicts modern psychological research on well-being, and it harms the individuals and communities who embrace it.

Trigger warnings are part of a larger ideology that teaches an inaccurate view of human beings – namely, that we are fragile and need to be protected. This prevailing ideology, which Haidt and Lukianoff refer to as Safetyism, overemphasizes the power words have over us while neglecting our innate ability to manage difficult emotional experiences. It encourages avoiding physical and emotional discomfort with the notion that they weaken the individual. Feeling bad is bad, and we should therefore seek to maintain a constant state of undisturbed homeostasis. The fear that temporary psychological distress can cause permanent physical damage, and can therefore be considered violence, lurks in the shadows.

Thankfully, we know from modern psychology that we are not fragile. We are antifragile: we require stressors in order to strengthen and maintain our stress response system. If antifragile systems are deprived of stressors – in a manner similar to muscles being deprived of exercise – they atrophy. That is precisely why play is crucial for developing children. Play, especially unsupervised play, inherently involves risk-taking, such as climbing a tree or seeing how high you can launch off of a swing. 

It is this confrontation and overcoming of risks that builds our resilience to the stressors of life. It is why Professor McNally (from the Harvard study) recommends “evidence-based, cognitive-behavioral therapies” which involve “gradual, systematic exposure to traumatic memories until their capacity to trigger distress diminishes.”

The glaring problem with Safetyism is that it deprives individuals of these invaluable experiences which build resilience. This creates a positive feedback loop in which less resilient students elicit overprotectiveness from administrators which make the students even less resilient, ad infinitum. Self-perception amplifies this self-fulfilling prophecy: if a student perceives themselves as weak, they actually become weaker. The end result: students are less able to cope with stress, resulting in increased anxiety and depression.   

The Worsening Mental Health Crisis

The culture of Safetyism is a contributing factor in the worsening mental health crisis on our campus. Just the other day I was sitting in a discussion section for SOC2580: Six Pretty Good Books when the teaching assistant flashed the results of an anonymous poll on the board: 50% of students in the class had identified as having a mental illness!

This statistic is saddening, but not surprising given the culture of Safetyism we have been cultivating. We teach students that they are fragile and then rob them of the very experiences they need in order to develop resilience – all in the name of protecting them. We teach them that ideas in and of themselves can be dangerous, that their mere utterance can cause “real harm.” We teach them that trauma can be as small as a “microaggression” and to always listen to their feelings. We hand them a hammer and send them off looking for nails to be offended by.

If anxiety is the physiological manifestation of our perceiving a threat in the environment, then no wonder rates of anxiety are spiking. In the world of Safetyism, our threshold for threat perception is diminished; everything is a threat. To top it off, we encourage students to interpret other people’s actions in the least generous way and then leave them unequipped in a highly polarized, political environment. What could possibly go wrong?

“Always trust your feelings” is another of the three Great Untruths, and the easiest to misinterpret. By no means are Haidt and Lukianoff advocating for invalidating your feelings. Feelings are important; they differentiate us from robots, enabling us to make friendships and to love. But, that does not mean your feelings are an accurate representation of reality.

In fact, emotional reasoning is one of the most common cognitive distortions. A student who feels upset by something another student said may conclude that the student doesn’t like them. While this conclusion may very well be true, it does not follow logically from the premise. Perhaps the other student was having a bad day or was playing devil’s advocate. If you focus only on the impact that their statement had on you, you are likely to be misled. It is therefore wise to reflect on your feelings, especially when they are extreme and negative. 

Any Person…Any Study?

I would like to address an argument that proponents of trigger warnings at Cornell frequently make. They cite Cornell’s motto – “Any person…any study” – as a justification for allowing students to opt-out of certain topics, implying the motto means that no student should be expected to study material that makes them uncomfortable. However, this argument neglects the primary goal of higher education, which is the pursuit of knowledge. Cornell’s motto is inherently a two-sided agreement between the school and the student – everyone is welcome on the condition that they fulfill their duties as a student, which requires exploring challenging ideas, especially those you find triggering.

Furthermore, being triggered is a threat to pursuing intellectual thought insofar as it is difficult to think clearly when you’ve been triggered. Our body’s freeze-fight-flight mechanism is not particularly conducive to learning. As Professor McNally warns, “…severe emotional reactions triggered by course material are a signal that students need to prioritize their mental health” and seek psychiatric counseling. This may entail taking time off from school.

Why You Should Care

The culture of Safetyism that surrounds trigger warnings threatens the success of American society and the health and happiness of the individuals that comprise it.  

We Cornellians are the leaders of tomorrow. As leaders, we will be forced to come face to face with challenges that involve emotionally-charged ideas relating to race, transgenderism, abortions, suicide, and sexual assault. The degree to which we use our critical thinking skills to solve these problems will affect millions of people, so it is imperative that we show up prepared. 

Becoming offended, playing the moral high ground, and banning dialogue on certain “untouchable” issues that make us uncomfortable won’t make the problems go away. As in Pascal’s wager, we are forced to choose; to run away and hide is simply to answer the problem poorly, with ignorance. It is to shirk the privileges and responsibilities that have been bestowed on all Cornellians.

Worse yet, the people we think we are protecting by silencing opinions on socially taboo topics are often the ones who are hurt the most. Professor Jeannie Suk Gersen of Harvard Law School observed in The New Yorker that “asking students to challenge each other in discussions of rape law has become so difficult that teachers are starting to give up on the subject…If the topic of sexual assault were to leave the law-school classroom, it would be a tremendous loss – above all to victims of sexual assault.” 

If our desire is to be happy and healthy human beings, Safetyism is setting us up for failure. It is increasing our anxiety and depression and decreasing our ability to think critically, forcing us to rely on someone or something else to tell us what to believe. It is creating a more hateful and polarized society, one that is less inclined towards mindful reflection, compassion, and empathy. 

But we are not condemned to this fate. One of the most remarkable qualities of the human mind is its ability to think abstractly, engage in reflection, and transcend emotion. It is this quality that led to Epictetus’ belief that, “What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance.” Some decades later, Marcus Aurelius declared that “It’s normal to feel pain in your hands and feet, if you’re using your feet as feet and your hands as hands. And for a human being to feel stress is normal – if he’s living a normal human life.” Thus, the goal is not to avoid challenges but to maintain an inner calm in spite of them. 

Emotions have the power to lead us far from the path of rationality, but we hold a superior counterpower to return to that path. When you do, if you so choose, you begin to realize that life isn’t a battle between good and evil, just well-intentioned people who disagree. That ideas can’t hurt you unless you let them. And, most importantly, that we are all a lot more alike than different.

A Radical Invitation

I invite you to use your remaining time at Cornell to challenge yourself with ideas and people you vehemently disagree with. Take the advice of Atticus Finch and really – I mean really – try to walk around in their shoes and see things from their perspective. It is no easy task, but nobody said life was easy and if they did they were wrong. Haidt, who is Jewish, said in a Q&A for my SOC2580 class that if an anti-Semite came to speak on campus, he would go and listen regardless of the pain it caused him. 

The world is a much safer place today than it was 50 years ago. And yet, if a stranger woke up from a coma at Cornell Health, he would think the world a very dangerous place. One cannot fail to notice the irony that the greatest efforts of Safetyism take place at wealthy, liberal arts schools in the northeast, where a vast majority of students are left-leaning and violence is all but nonexistent.

When Haidt conducted his Q&A, he made many claims that were sensible but that didn’t align with woke orthodoxy – to the horror of the class. Being aware of this and being a proponent of exchanging ideas, he encouraged every student who asked a question to follow up and challenge his arguments if they disagreed. I will leave it to the reader to guess how many students took him up on his offer. Let Safetyism serve as a potent reminder; the road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions.