Concept Creep: What Makes Us the ‘Snowflake’ Generation A man offers a woman his seat on a crowded subway. A secretary makes a joke at the expense of a new hire at the office. A teenager views a lynching in a television documentary on the civil rights movement. A working mother tells her daughter to stop doing her homework so that she can take care of her younger siblings. Is the man performing an act of discrimination? Is this secretary involved in workplace bullying? Did the teenager experience trauma? Was the mother abusing her daughter? According to a study by Nick Haslam, if you are young and liberal, you are more likely to answer yes to these questions. Haslam’s study states that we have begun to expand our ideas of what constitutes abuse, bullying, trauma, and prejudice. He terms this “concept creep.” It is essentially a heightened sensitivity to all types of harm. Haslam detected concept creep via two key studies. Both were a compilations of correlational survey data. Participants were selected using Amazon Mechanical Turk, a study recruitment tool. They ranged in age from 19-70, with a relatively even split of 161 men and 116 women. The primary questionnaire showed participants a series of scenarios that bordered on harmful – much like the scenarios I mentioned above. Then, it asked whether they should be considered abuse, harassment, etc. The average answer among all participants was “slightly agree.” In order to connect this broadening of concepts to demographic factors, he also gave 4 other questionnaires. On one, participants were asked to relate their political biases on a scale from 1-6 (1 being extremely liberal and 6 being extremely conservative.) Participants then took the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, which indicated how much of their moral compass was based on harm. Finally, the participants were rated on the Interpersonal Reactivity Index to measure markers of empathy in the subjects. The results in both studies showed that those with liberal political opinion have roughly a 50% larger concept of harm. Younger people seemed to have broader concepts only in the second study, interestingly, where they showed nearly 30% broader harm concepts. Moral and emotional indicators also correlated with broader harm concepts, as high entitlement and empathy indicators show a 32% and 28% increase in concept creep, respectively. While it may seem that only young, entitled, overly sensitive people hold broad concepts of harm, concept creep does have potential upsides, notes Haslam. The expansion of harm concepts indicates our increasing empathy for the suffering of our peers. Sensitivity allows us to intervene more often in actual cases of harassment, abuse, and prejudice. The #MeToo movement is an excellent example of these positive effects. On the contrary, it does have negative consequences as well. Concept creep has resulted in wrongful abuse convictions, the rise of victimization mentality, and has contributed to the continually falling mental health of our youth. Even though we have a limited understanding of the real implications of concept creep, it is absolutely necessary to understand the theory in today’s society. Awareness of concept creep can prevent harm done by those pushing for increased sensitivity, while knowledge of its contributions to progress can encourage a healthier pursuit of empathy in our culture.
