Concept Creep¶
Expand a harm-related concept horizontally to new kinds of cases or vertically to less severe cases, altering its extension, thresholds, and social consequences.
Core Idea¶
Concept creep is the expansion of harm- or pathology-related concepts beyond their earlier extensions. Horizontal creep includes qualitatively new kinds of cases: a concept comes to cover phenomena unlike the original prototype. Vertical creep lowers the severity threshold: milder cases of the same general kind enter the category. Haslam developed the distinction through histories of concepts such as abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice.
The term describes a direction and structure of conceptual change, not by itself an error. Expansion may recognize neglected suffering and widen protection; it may also reduce discrimination among levels or kinds of harm, inflate prevalence, encourage overpathologization, or generate institutional mismatch. The normative judgment depends on evidence, purpose, consequences, and whether subcategories preserve useful distinctions.
Scope of Application¶
Research examines psychological, psychiatric, moral, legal-adjacent, and public concepts including trauma, addiction, prejudice, bullying, abuse, harassment, safety, and disorder. Methods include historical definition comparison, text corpora, expert coding, vignette-based boundary judgments, individual-difference scales, and cross-group comparisons.
The construct is most informative when a baseline and later extension can be evidenced. Anecdotes about one contested usage do not establish population-level semantic change. Different communities may maintain distinct extensions at the same time, so analysis should specify period, institution, audience, and context.
Clarity¶
Horizontal and vertical expansion can co-occur but must be distinguished. Calling indirect exclusion “bullying” might be horizontal if the older prototype required direct aggression; calling a minor one-time insult bullying might be vertical if it lowers severity or repetition thresholds. The classification depends on the documented baseline.
Manages Complexity¶
The two-axis framework makes diffuse arguments about “words changing” testable. It asks which cases moved across a boundary and whether the movement concerns kind or degree. Separating descriptive expansion from normative assessment prevents disagreement over consequences from obscuring agreement about semantic history.
Yet a binary in/out model can oversimplify graded, prototype-based concepts. Subtypes, severity scales, context clauses, and professional versus colloquial registers may preserve precision even as a superordinate category expands.
Abstract Reasoning¶
- Select a target concept and define the community, register, and time span. 2. Reconstruct the earlier extension from manuals, corpora, dictionaries, policies, or judgments. 3. Measure later extension with comparable evidence. 4. Identify newly included cases and classify change as horizontal, vertical, or both. 5. Rule out simple prevalence, reporting, sampling, or measurement changes. 6. Trace candidate transmission mechanisms without assuming a single cause.
Knowledge Transfer¶
The general lesson is that category boundaries respond to moral attention, institutions, and feedback from classification. Monitoring both coverage and discrimination is useful whenever a protective concept expands.
The proposed immediate parent is Semantic Narrowing and Widening. Concept creep is a harm-centered, psychologically theorized specialization with a horizontal/vertical taxonomy and an empirical cultural-dynamics program.
Relationships to Other Abstractions¶
Current abstraction Concept Creep Domain-specific
Parents (1) — more general patterns this builds on
-
Concept Creep is a kind of Semantic Narrowing and Widening Domain-specific
Semantic Narrowing and Widening is the proposed immediate parent.
Hierarchy path (1) — routes to 1 parentless root
- Concept Creep → Semantic Narrowing and Widening → Semantic Shift → Signifier–Signified Duality → Representation → Abstraction
Neighborhood in Abstraction Space¶
Concept Creep sits in a sparse region of the domain-specific corpus (99th percentile for distinctiveness): few abstractions share its structure, so a faithful description tends to retrieve it precisely.
Family — Unclustered & Miscellaneous (1565 abstractions)
Nearest neighbors
- Geneticization — 0.76
- Systemic Hypothesising — 0.74
- No Contact — 0.74
- Pain Tolerance — 0.74
- Tree Testing — 0.73
Computed from structural-signature embeddings · 2026-09-08