Concept Creep Research Articles

The Creeping Concept of Trauma

Over the past century, the concept of trauma has substantially broadened its meanings in academic and public discourse. We document four directions in which this semantic expansion has occurred at different times: from somatic to psychic, extraordinary to ordinary, direct to indirect, and individual to collective. We analyze these expansions as instances of "concept creep," the progressive inflation of harm-related concepts, and present evidence for the rising cultural salience and semantic enlargement of trauma in recent decades. Expansive concepts of trauma may have mixed blessings for personal and collective identity.

Development and validation of the Harm Concept Breadth Scale: Assessing individual differences in harm inflation.

Three studies (Ns = 350, 301 & 341) examined the reliability, validity, and correlates of a new measure of harm inflation, the individual differences counterpart of ‘concept creep’. The Harm Concept Breadth Scale (HCBS) assesses variability in the expansiveness of concepts of harm (i.e., bullying, mental disorder, prejudice, trauma), such that these concepts refer to a wider range of phenomena among people scoring high on the scale. Study 1 developed 66 vignettes representing potential instances of the four concepts, selected optimal subsets of 10 vignettes for each concept, and demonstrated satisfactory internal consistency of the subscales. Study 2 demonstrated that the HCBS had excellent internal consistency, and established construct validity through associations with measures of moral foundations, justice sensitivity, general category inclusiveness, and political orientation. Study 3 employed participants from a different national background and further clarified the correlates of the HCBS via measures of empathy, moral expansiveness, and the Big Five personality traits. The findings indicate that concept breadth is a reliably measurable individual difference variable with weak to moderate associations with harm-based morality, prosocial concern, political liberalism, female gender, and negative emotionality. The HCBS is a valid psychometric instrument for examining the causes and implications of harm inflation.

Harm inflation: Making sense of concept creep

ABSTRACT “Concept creep” is the gradual semantic expansion of harm-related concepts such as bullying, mental disorder, prejudice, and trauma. This review presents a synopsis of relevant theoretical advances and empirical research findings on the phenomenon. It addresses three fundamental questions. First, it clarifies the characterisation of concept creep by refining its theoretical and historical dimensions and presenting studies investigating the change in harm-related concepts using computational linguistics. Second, it examines factors that have caused concept creep, including cultural shifts in sensitivity to harm, societal changes in the prevalence of harm, and intentional meaning changes engineered for political ends. Third, the paper develops an account of the consequences of concept creep, including social conflict, political polarisation, speech restrictions, victim identities, and progressive social change. This extended analysis of concept creep helps to understand its mixed implications and sets a multi-pronged agenda for future research on the topic.

“Nowadays there is gender”: “Doing” global gender equality in rural Malawi

This article analyzes the intersection of psychology with global development policy and practice, reviewing how gender as a concept is negotiated and understood amongst men and women in rural Malawi. We argue that gender, considered from a psychological perspective, has been narrowed down to meet the standards of global policy actors. By empowering individuals to “self-actualize,” policy implementers expect social and economic spin-off effects such as lower birth rates, higher education levels, and poverty reduction. The focus on individuals acts to obscure the broader structural power inequities, is especially prevalent in rural Malawi. To explain this, we use Haslam’s idea of “concept creep,” on how psychological concepts tend to affect other institutional traditions. The everyday understandings of gendered life described here show how gender is a fluid concept that shifts according to cultural, social, and ideological norms.

Broad concepts of sexism predict polarized moral judgments of victims and perpetrators

Research on concept creep suggests that the expansiveness of people's concepts of harm has implications for their moral judgments. The present study assessed the breadth of 201 American participants' concepts of sexual harassment and gender discrimination, examined predictors of the breadth of these concepts, and tested relationships between concept breadth and moral judgments of a female victim and male perpetrators in a workplace sexism scenario. The breadth of participants' sexism-related concepts was most strongly predicted by their endorsement of harm-based morality and was the strongest predictor of the perceived moral deservingness of the victim and moral responsibility of the perpetrators.

Concept creepers: Individual differences in harm-related concepts and their correlates

Research on ‘concept creep’ argues that harm-related concepts such as abuse, bullying, prejudice, and trauma have expanded their meanings in recent decades. Theorists have suggested that this semantic expansion may have mixed implications. Broadened concepts might problematize harmful behavior that was previously tolerated but might also make people over-sensitive and fragile. Two studies using American MTurk samples (Ns = 276, 309) examined individual differences in the breadth of people's concepts of harm and explored their correlates. Study 1 found reliable variations in concept breadth that were consistent across four disparate harm-related concepts. As predicted, people with broader concepts tended to endorse harm-based morality, liberal political attitudes, and high empathic concern. Contrary to prediction, younger people did not have broader concepts. Study 2 replicated the association between concept breadth and liberalism and extended the empathy finding by showing that concept breadth was associated with sensitivity to injustice toward others but not the self. In this study, people holding broader concepts were younger and tended to feel more vulnerable and entitled. These findings indicate that holding broader concepts of harm may have mixed implications.

The Power of the Normal

How do judgments about law and morality shift? Why do we come to see political or other conduct as acceptable, when we had formerly seen it as unacceptable, immoral, or even horrific? Why do shifts occur in the opposite direction? Why accounts for the power of “the new normal”? A clue comes from the fact that some of our judgments are unstable, in the sense that they are an artifact of, or endogenous to, what else we see. This is true of sensory perception: Whether an object counts as blue or purple depends on what other objects surround it. It is also true for ethical judgments: Whether conduct counts as unethical depends on what other conduct is on people’s viewscreens. It follows that conduct that was formerly seen as unethical may come to seem ethical, as terrible behavior becomes more common, and also that conduct that was formerly seen as ethical may come to seem unethical, as good behavior becomes more common. In these circumstances, law (and enforcement practices) can have an important signaling effect, giving people a sense of what is normal and what is not. There is an important supplemental point, intensifying these effects: Once conduct comes to be seen as part of an unacceptable category – abusiveness, racism, lack of patriotism, microaggression, sexual harassment – real or apparent exemplars that are not so egregious, or perhaps not objectionable at all, might be taken as egregious, because they take on the stigma now associated with the category. Stigmatization by categorization can intensify the process by which formerly unobjectionable behavior becomes regarded as abhorrent. There is a relationship between stigmatization by categorization and “concept creep,” an idea applied in psychology to shifting understandings of such concepts as abuse, bullying, mental illness, and prejudice. The idea of “concept creep” has large and insufficiently explored implications for law and politics.

Concept Evaluation Using the PDSA Cycle for Continuous Quality Improvement.

As concept-based nursing education gains popularity, there is little literature on how to sustain quality after initiation of the curriculum. Critical appraisal of concepts in a university program revealed varying definitions, attributes, and exemplars resulting in student confusion. The Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA) cycle for continuous quality improvement was used for concept evaluation. The goals of the evaluation project were: 1) to develop common definition and attributes for concepts and 2) to develop horizontal and vertical leveling of exemplars to build on prior student learning. The continuous quality improvement process can be used to prevent "concept creep" and ensure internal consistency of concept definitions, attributes, and exemplars.

Concept Creep: Psychology's Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology

Many of psychology's concepts have undergone semantic shifts in recent years. These conceptual changes follow a consistent trend. Concepts that refer to the negative aspects of human experience and behavior have expanded their meanings so that they now encompass a much broader range of phenomena than before. This expansion takes “horizontal” and “vertical” forms: concepts extend outward to capture qualitatively new phenomena and downward to capture quantitatively less extreme phenomena. The concepts of abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice are examined to illustrate these historical changes. In each case, the concept's boundary has stretched and its meaning has dilated. A variety of explanations for this pattern of “concept creep” are considered and its implications are explored. I contend that the expansion primarily reflects an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm, reflecting a liberal moral agenda. Its implications are ambivalent, however. Although conceptual change is inevitable and often well motivated, concept creep runs the risk of pathologizing everyday experience and encouraging a sense of virtuous but impotent victimhood.

Did you just say what I think you said? Talking about genes, identity and information

Genetic information is becoming increasingly used in modern life, extending beyond medicine to familial history, forensics and more. Following this expansion of use, the effect of genetic information on people’s identity and ultimately people’s quality of life is being explored in a host of different disciplines. While a multidisciplinary approach is commendable and necessary, there is the potential for the multidisciplinarity to produce conceptual misconnection. That is, while experts in one field may understand their use of a term like ‘gene’, ‘identity’ or ‘information’ for experts in another field, the same term may link to a distinctly different concept. These conceptual misconnections not only increase inefficiency in complex organisational practices, but can also have important ethical, legal and social consequences. This paper comes at the problem of conceptual misconnection by clarifying different uses of the terms ‘gene’, ‘identity’ and ‘information’. I start by looking at three different conceptions of the gene; the Instrumental, the Nominal and the Postgenomic Molecular. Secondly, a taxonomy of four different concepts of identity is presented; Numeric, Character, Group and Essentialised, and their use is clarified. A general concept of Information is introduced, and finally three distinct kinds of information are described. I then introduce Concept Creep as an ethical problem that arises from conceptual misconnections. The primary goal of this paper is to reduce the potential for conceptual misconnection when discussing genetic identity and genetic information. This is complimented by three secondary goals—1) to clarify what a conceptual misconnection is, 2) to explain why clarity of use is particularly important to discussions of genes, identity and information and 3) to show how concept creep between different uses of genetic identity and genetic information can have important ethical outcomes.