The Ways In Which We Could Be Traumatizing Ourselves

When you're told to expect catastrophe, or are rewarded for doing so, what does that do to you in the long run?

You should read a paper called “Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology,” published in Psychological Inquiry by the researcher Nick Haslam. It came out in 2016 and I think I simply missed it — and some of the subsequent discussion surrounding it — at the time. But it deserves a long shelf life.

The basic idea:

The conceptual c…