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See "concept creep" - https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2016-08154-001 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2016-08154-001 Abstract: > Many of psychology's concepts ha

by wisty 5y ago

See "concept creep" - https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2016-08154-001 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2016-08154-001 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. The full article has a bit more nuance. It points out that intolerance to minor forms of harm has both pros and cons.

tablespoon 5y ago
> This expansion takes “horizontal” and “vertical” forms: concepts extend outward to capture qualitatively new phenomena and downward to capture quantitatively less extreme phenomena.... 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. Also the dilution in the "downward" direction denies the people with the original, more-serious issues the vocabulary to deal with their unique problems and will eventually engender skepticism in large parts of the general public (e.g. if "abuse" expands to encompass extremely common experiences, saying "I was a abused" ceases to have much meaning, and you end up with nonsense like "Were you just abused, or were use abused abused?").
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  And in the meantime it creates injustices in the other direction, e.g. when Julian Assange is accused of "rape" which the public understands to mean a particular very serious thing, but Sweden uses a definition that encompasses much more than that very serious thing. Meanwhile a thousand articles are published containing his name and the word "rape" together in the headline.
- kongin 5y ago
  It already happened with rape. We need a separate word for leering, groping, fondling, sex with dubious consent, and violently beating someone during penetration without consent. Rape used to mean only the last thing and it was regarded as basically the worst form of assault short of murder since it included every possible form of assault. Today it's moved to fondling and people are trying to make it include leering. Using the same legal punishments for something that is clearly different makes very little sense and normalizes rape in the long term.
  - zpeti 5y ago
    Funny how you are getting downvoted, I can guess the thinking behind it. But you are right. The way rape is being treated now is like saying an accidental traffic accident manslaughter should be punished like a serial killer. It’s just not the same and it’s not fair. This in no way makes groping or leering acceptable. But it’s still completely different to violent rape penetrative assault.
  - the_rectifier 5y ago
    > Rape used to mean only the last thing and it was regarded as basically the worst form of assault No, it did not. That's why you find courts always charged offenders for multiple different crimes when they are carried out together: rape, assault, kidnapping, life threats...
    - luckylion 5y ago
      It's much clearer in German. Rape = Vergewaltigung. It contains gewalt = violence. Stuff like "rape by deception" as a court ruled in Israel because a Jewish Israeli woman had sex with a man she though to be Jewish but wasn't shouldn't be considered rape (I'd argue being the wrong ethnicity while having consensual sex shouldn't be a crime at all). Now we have rape and we also have rape rape, like, the real rape.
DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
> I contend that the expansion primarily reflects an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm, reflecting a liberal moral agenda. I don't feel comfortable with anyone using the term "liberal moral agenda" unironically because of culture-specific connotations: for starters, it's a very US-specific phrase which will have attached meanings that would be lost or misinterpreted by people unfamiliar with how the term "liberal" specifically relates to US political discourse - and the hugely negative (to downright toxic) connotations attached to the label "liberal moral agenda" by the reactionary right-wing - which all make conversations like these impossible to have.
- inkblotuniverse 5y ago
  How would that make conversations impossible to have? Just talk to the reactionary right-wingers about what they see as the liberal moral agenda. (Of course there's a liberal moral agenda- there's an X moral agenda for every X).
- clavicat 5y ago
  Translation: it’s bad PR for my tribe. One of the privileges of occupying a position of hegemony is that you get to instruct your subjects in how they are allowed to refer to power, and pathologize expressions that are offensive to it. Liberals have all these rules about how you are allowed to describe liberals—the idea that we should observe similar courtesies when describing the “reactionary right-wing” as you pejoratively put it is, naturally, absurd. So even an anodyne description like “liberal moral agenda” of what is objectively a moral agenda informed by liberal priorities becomes verboten, simply because it allows its adversaries to vocalize their opposition to it. Depriving the opposition of their own vocabulary and replacing it with one of your making is a classic move—anyone who fails to update their dictionary marks themselves as an enemy. Someone is indeed making conversation impossible to have, but whose fault is that, exactly?
alex_munroe 5y ago
> I contend that the expansion primarily reflects an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm Or maybe once you've weaponized a concept, it's tempting to use it as much as you can. When being a nerd stopped being shameful and started being cool, all the cool kids started calling themselves nerds for liking Avengers and Harry Potter - why wouldn't you claim the social points that are just lying around? And when you live in a society that rewards victimhood, when calling someone a bully gives you power over them - of course people will jump at any chance to call themselves a victim.
bambataa 5y ago
I have noticed this with “victim blaming”. I understood it to refer fairly specifically to sexual assault victims being blamed for “asking for it” by wearing a skirt or whatever. Now I see it being used in relationship advice subreddits and agony aunt columns to basically mean “don’t dare disagree with me” when someone decides that they were the victim in some some dispute.
- rdtwo 5y ago
  Victim blaming is still acceptable in our culture except the victim has to fall into a certain demographic.
nathias 5y ago
leaky abstractions
spangry 5y ago
Sounds very similar to "Prevalence-induced concept change in human judgment" - https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.aap8731 https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.aap8731 > Why do some social problems seem so intractable? In a series of experiments, we show that people often respond to decreases in the prevalence of a stimulus by expanding their concept of it. When blue dots became rare, participants began to see purple dots as blue; when threatening faces became rare, participants began to see neutral faces as threatening; and when unethical requests became rare, participants began to see innocuous requests as unethical. This “prevalence-induced concept change” occurred even when participants were forewarned about it and even when they were instructed and paid to resist it. Social problems may seem intractable in part because reductions in their prevalence lead people to see more of them.
evv555 5y ago
See syllogisms. Technically a battle against "whiteness" is not the same as a battle against "white". But in practice the syllogism makes the two indifferentiable.

by wisty 5y ago

tablespoon 5y ago

> This expansion takes “horizontal” and “vertical” forms: concepts extend outward to capture qualitatively new phenomena and downward to capture quantitatively less extreme phenomena.... 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. Also the dilution in the "downward" direction denies the people with the original, more-serious issues the vocabulary to deal with their unique problems and will eventually engender skepticism in large parts of the general public (e.g. if "abuse" expands to encompass extremely common experiences, saying "I was a abused" ceases to have much meaning, and you end up with nonsense like "Were you just abused, or were use abused abused?").

AnthonyMouse 5y ago
And in the meantime it creates injustices in the other direction, e.g. when Julian Assange is accused of "rape" which the public understands to mean a particular very serious thing, but Sweden uses a definition that encompasses much more than that very serious thing. Meanwhile a thousand articles are published containing his name and the word "rape" together in the headline.
kongin 5y ago
It already happened with rape. We need a separate word for leering, groping, fondling, sex with dubious consent, and violently beating someone during penetration without consent. Rape used to mean only the last thing and it was regarded as basically the worst form of assault short of murder since it included every possible form of assault. Today it's moved to fondling and people are trying to make it include leering. Using the same legal punishments for something that is clearly different makes very little sense and normalizes rape in the long term.
- zpeti 5y ago
  Funny how you are getting downvoted, I can guess the thinking behind it. But you are right. The way rape is being treated now is like saying an accidental traffic accident manslaughter should be punished like a serial killer. It’s just not the same and it’s not fair. This in no way makes groping or leering acceptable. But it’s still completely different to violent rape penetrative assault.
- the_rectifier 5y ago
  > Rape used to mean only the last thing and it was regarded as basically the worst form of assault No, it did not. That's why you find courts always charged offenders for multiple different crimes when they are carried out together: rape, assault, kidnapping, life threats...
  - luckylion 5y ago
    It's much clearer in German. Rape = Vergewaltigung. It contains gewalt = violence. Stuff like "rape by deception" as a court ruled in Israel because a Jewish Israeli woman had sex with a man she though to be Jewish but wasn't shouldn't be considered rape (I'd argue being the wrong ethnicity while having consensual sex shouldn't be a crime at all). Now we have rape and we also have rape rape, like, the real rape.

DaiPlusPlus 5y ago

> I contend that the expansion primarily reflects an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm, reflecting a liberal moral agenda. I don't feel comfortable with anyone using the term "liberal moral agenda" unironically because of culture-specific connotations: for starters, it's a very US-specific phrase which will have attached meanings that would be lost or misinterpreted by people unfamiliar with how the term "liberal" specifically relates to US political discourse - and the hugely negative (to downright toxic) connotations attached to the label "liberal moral agenda" by the reactionary right-wing - which all make conversations like these impossible to have.

inkblotuniverse 5y ago
How would that make conversations impossible to have? Just talk to the reactionary right-wingers about what they see as the liberal moral agenda. (Of course there's a liberal moral agenda- there's an X moral agenda for every X).
clavicat 5y ago
Translation: it’s bad PR for my tribe. One of the privileges of occupying a position of hegemony is that you get to instruct your subjects in how they are allowed to refer to power, and pathologize expressions that are offensive to it. Liberals have all these rules about how you are allowed to describe liberals—the idea that we should observe similar courtesies when describing the “reactionary right-wing” as you pejoratively put it is, naturally, absurd. So even an anodyne description like “liberal moral agenda” of what is objectively a moral agenda informed by liberal priorities becomes verboten, simply because it allows its adversaries to vocalize their opposition to it. Depriving the opposition of their own vocabulary and replacing it with one of your making is a classic move—anyone who fails to update their dictionary marks themselves as an enemy. Someone is indeed making conversation impossible to have, but whose fault is that, exactly?

alex_munroe 5y ago

> I contend that the expansion primarily reflects an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm Or maybe once you've weaponized a concept, it's tempting to use it as much as you can. When being a nerd stopped being shameful and started being cool, all the cool kids started calling themselves nerds for liking Avengers and Harry Potter - why wouldn't you claim the social points that are just lying around? And when you live in a society that rewards victimhood, when calling someone a bully gives you power over them - of course people will jump at any chance to call themselves a victim.

bambataa 5y ago

I have noticed this with “victim blaming”. I understood it to refer fairly specifically to sexual assault victims being blamed for “asking for it” by wearing a skirt or whatever. Now I see it being used in relationship advice subreddits and agony aunt columns to basically mean “don’t dare disagree with me” when someone decides that they were the victim in some some dispute.

rdtwo 5y ago
Victim blaming is still acceptable in our culture except the victim has to fall into a certain demographic.

nathias 5y ago

leaky abstractions

spangry 5y ago

Sounds very similar to "Prevalence-induced concept change in human judgment" - https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.aap8731 https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.aap8731 > Why do some social problems seem so intractable? In a series of experiments, we show that people often respond to decreases in the prevalence of a stimulus by expanding their concept of it. When blue dots became rare, participants began to see purple dots as blue; when threatening faces became rare, participants began to see neutral faces as threatening; and when unethical requests became rare, participants began to see innocuous requests as unethical. This “prevalence-induced concept change” occurred even when participants were forewarned about it and even when they were instructed and paid to resist it. Social problems may seem intractable in part because reductions in their prevalence lead people to see more of them.

evv555 5y ago

See syllogisms. Technically a battle against "whiteness" is not the same as a battle against "white". But in practice the syllogism makes the two indifferentiable.