I was listening to a discussion between 3 NYU Law Professors, an NYU Law Student (who happens to be an SJW), and a Social Psychologist, Jonathan Haidt--get his book (Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion). Basically, the talk was about 75 minutes and included the student advocating for content and trigger warnings in the classroom. Jonathan Haidt vehemently opposed this and the three professors were pretty much in agreement with Haidt.
Haidt mentioned something called "CONCEPT CREEK," which is a psychological term developed by Nick Haslam, a social/clinical psychologist out of Australia. The idea behind "Concept Creek" is that certain terms such as Abuse, Trauma, Bullying, etc, have taken on semantic shifts and now capture a broader range of experiences which may not be justified. For example, a war veteran sees his friends get blown up and killed--he has had a traumatic experience. Now, college kids are saying they are traumatized because of hurt feelings; obviously, the term trauma is now being induced to capture the most minute of experiences. According to Naslam, "The expansion primarily reflects an ever increasing sensitivity to harm, reflecting a liberal moral agenda."
I know Getbig has some of the brightest, upcoming minds, so I wanted to share this piece of knowledge.
Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology
Nick Haslam
Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia
Abstract
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.
