What is 'concept creep'?



Concept creep is a term that comes from the academic discipline of psychology. It describes the tendency towards 'expanding concepts of harm and pathology'. 

by applying concepts of abuse, bullying, and trauma to less severe and clearly defined actions and events, and by increasingly including subjective elements into them, concept creep may release a flood of unjustified accusations and litigation, as well as excessive and disproportionate enforcement regimes. 

The concepts of abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice ... {have been subjected to historical changes}. In each case, the concept's boundary has stretched and its meaning has dilated. Source  

This trend towards a very broad definition of what constitutes 'harm' has been particularly pronounced on university campuses in the USA and - to a lesser extent - in the UK.  


One practical consequence has been an increasingly nervous interpretation of what might 'trigger' a traumatic response by university administrators and media content providers. 

Concept creep of concept creep

Ironically, the term concept creep has been subjected to an expansion of its own terms of reference. It is sometimes used in public discourse  to describe the process of moving from a narrow to a broader objective. 

With Covid, for example, some  have suggested that original UK government objective ('stop the health service from being overwhelmed') expanded to 'zero covid' an aspiration to eliminate the virus entirely. It has also widened to cover general public health objectives:  like reducing obesity etc.

See Conor Friedersdorf's Atlantic essay, 'How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm'