The Shifting Landscape of Harm: Investigating the Phenomenon of Concept Creep in Harm Perception

Concept creep, the gradual semantic expansion of harm-related concepts (Haslam et al., 2020), is a phenomenon garnering increasing attention in the field of psychology and is examined in the context of shifting perceptions of what is considered harmful. While what is considered harmful has shifted throughout generations, why these shifts happen and what motivates society to accept these broadening definitions has yet to be explained. Up to this point individual differences such as activism, risk, empathy, stressful life events, and dark triad personality have yet to be investigated as potential contributors to the expansion of harm-related concepts. Thus, this group of studies investigated the influences of generational changes and individual differences on the broadening of harm-related concepts. Study 1 was a correlational investigation to better understand how empathy, exposure to severe events, and other critical individual differences relate to supporting the broadening of harm-related concepts. Results from Study 1 suggest that higher levels of empathy and left-wing authoritarianism were the primary drivers of the expansion of fringe forms of harm. Participants’ age showed some conflicting results by having the older age group supporting the expansion of harm-related concepts. There was no significant interaction between the other predictors (stressful life events, and empathy) and age. The results from the other analysis showed that left-wing authoritarianism and activism emerged as strong positive predictors. Study 2 was an experimental design that examines how increasing empathy affects the support for the broadening of harm-related events. The results from Study 2 suggest there was only one main effect in Prejudice. However, there were significant interactions of the condition with empathy, left-wing authoritarianism, and activism. Participants who scored higher in trait empathy were more sensitive to the experimental manipulation than those low in trait empathy. The combined findings of Study 1 and 2 provide novel insights into the broadening of harm-related concepts and directions for future research.