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A new paper suggests a link between censoriousness and mental illness.
Many people now believe that words can cause lasting harm.
This belief has grown strong enough for some to justify violence. A recent survey by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression found that more than 40% of Gen Z respondents said it can be acceptable to use physical violence to prevent someone from giving a speech.
A newly published paper led by Samuel Pratt at UCLA seeks to measure this belief directly. The researchers built what they call the “Words Can Harm Scale,” a survey asking people how much they agree with statements like, “I could be left emotionally scarred by something I read.”
The first finding is that this belief is stable. People who score high on the scale tend to score high again two weeks later. Some people simply see words as more dangerous than others do, and this appears to be a fixed trait.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Rob Henderson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. He has a PhD in psychology from the University of Cambridge and is the best-selling author of “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.”