Words Can Harm Test (WCHS)

This test is based on the Words Can Harm Scale (WCHS), a ten-item measure of the belief that words can cause lasting psychological harm. The scale was originally developed by Benjamin Bellet, Payton Jones, and Richard McNally in their 2018 research on trigger warnings and was formally validated by Samuel Pratt and colleagues in a 2026 study published in Personality and Individual Differences. In that validation, conducted on a nationally representative sample of 956 U.S. adults, the scale showed excellent internal consistency, strong two-week test-retest reliability, and a clear one-dimensional structure: the ten items hang together as a single overall belief that words can harm.

People clearly differ in this belief. Almost everyone agrees that sustained verbal abuse is damaging, but opinions divide sharply over insults, slurs, disturbing books, and confrontational speech. Some people see such words as unpleasant but transient — irritating in the moment and forgotten within days. Others believe that a single hurtful remark, or exposure to the wrong idea, can wound a person as deeply and as permanently as a physical injury. Where a person lands on this spectrum matters, because acts perceived as harmful tend to be moralized: they provoke outrage, assign blame, and generate calls for protection or punishment.

The test reports your results across three domains, together with an overall score. Word Sensitivity reflects the sense that you personally could be wounded by words — that something you read or hear could leave you emotionally scarred. Lasting Damage reflects the belief that words can inflict enduring, even clinical, harm on people in general. Protectiveness reflects the conviction that speakers should weigh their words carefully and that vulnerable listeners should be shielded from certain kinds of speech. In the published research the scale measures one overall belief, so the three domains are reporting groupings rather than validated subscales, and the total score is the figure the research supports.

The validation study also mapped out who tends to hold this belief. People with higher scores were on average younger, more often female, and more politically liberal. They described themselves as more empathic and more intellectually humble, but also scored higher on moral grandstanding and on support for silencing viewpoints they consider harmful, and they were more supportive of trigger warnings, safe spaces, and political correctness. Higher scorers additionally reported worse mental health: more symptoms of anxiety and depression, lower resilience, greater difficulty regulating emotions, and a stronger fear of anxiety itself. None of these associations settles whether the belief is accurate — the scale's authors describe it as a divisive issue within modern cultural discourse and offer the measure as a neutral instrument for studying it.

The test presents the ten published statements of the WCHS in their original order, answered on a five-point agreement scale, and expresses each score as a percentage from 0 to 100. In the validation sample, the average U.S. adult landed at roughly 59% overall, agreeing most strongly with statements about the general power of words and least with statements about being personally scarred by reading. The comparison markers shown on your results are derived from that study's published item averages; they are estimates carried over from that one published sample, not validated percentiles for this exact administration.

A high score is not a diagnosis, and a low score is not proof of thick skin: beliefs about harmful speech are shaped by personal history, culture, and the kinds of speech a person has actually been exposed to. This test is provided for educational and entertainment purposes only. It is not psychological advice, and it is not affiliated with the original authors or their institutions.

References

• Pratt, S., Jones, P. J., Bellet, B. W., McNally, R. J., & Gray, K. (2026). The words can harm scale: Measuring beliefs about harmful speech. Personality and Individual Differences, 257, 113785.
• Bellet, B. W., Jones, P. J., & McNally, R. J. (2018). Trigger warning: Empirical evidence ahead. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 61, 134-141.