Concept Creep: How Chalked "Trump 2016" Messages Came To Be Seen As Death Threats And Why I Got Accused Of Hating "Brown People" Yesterday
Great piece in The Guardian on this by Jonathan Haidt and Nick Haslam (also explained at greater length on Heterodox Academy):

So how did it come to pass that many Emory students felt victimised and traumatised by innocuous and erasable graffiti?

One of us (Haslam) recently published an essay titled "Concept creep: Psychology's expanding concepts of harm and pathology." Many concepts are "creeping" - they are being "defined down" so that they are applied promiscuously to milder and less objectionable events.

Take the concept of bullying:

It has crept outward or "horizontally" to encompass new forms of bullying, such as among adults in the workplace or via social media. More problematic, though, is the creeping downward or "vertically"so that the bar has been lowered and more minor events now count as bullying.

For example, the criteria of intentionality and repetition are often dropped. What matters most is the subjective perception of the victim. If a person believes that he or she has been made to suffer in any way, by a single action, the victim can call it bullying.

As the definition of bullying creeps downward for researchers, it also creeps downward in school systems, most of which now enforce strict anti-bullying policies.

This may explain why Emory students, raised since elementary school with expansive notions of bullying and subjective notions of victimhood, could perceive the words "Trump 2016" as an act of bullying, intimidation, perhaps even violence, regardless of the intentions of the writer.

A second key concept that has crept downward is trauma. Medicine and psychiatry once reserved that word for physical damage to organs and tissues, such as a traumatic brain injury. But by the 1980s, events that caused extreme terror, such as rape or witnessing atrocities in war, were recognised as causing long-lasting effects known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The original criteria for PTSD required that a traumatic event "would evoke significant symptoms of distress in almost everyone" and would be "outside the range of usual human experience."

But in recent trauma scholarship these stringent criteria are gone; like bullying, trauma is now assessed subjectively. In one recent definition used by a US Government agency, trauma refers to anything that is "experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or threatening and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual's functioning and physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being."

It's not surprising that I got a letter from a woman who believed she had PTSD -- because she dated a compulsive liar for three months. Here's an excerpt from my correction of her "concept creep" in my column:

Tales from your PTSD support group:

THEM: "I was held captive with a burlap bag over my head and beaten with electrical cords."
YOU: "I'm right there with you, bro. This dude I was dating told me his Ferrari was paid for, and it turned out to be leased!"

YOU: "My boyfriend pretended he was buying a mansion, but he really lives with his parents."
THEM: "That's terrible. Can you help me put on my prosthetic leg?"

Sure, according to Pat Benatar, "love is a battlefield." But spending three months fighting with a sociopathic boyfriend doesn't leave you ducking for cover whenever a car backfires like a guy who did three tours of IED disposal in Iraq and came home with most of the parts he went in with. Ofer Zur, a psychologist who specializes in treating post-traumatic stress disorder, explains, "To meet the diagnostic criteria for PTSD, the stressor experienced must involve actual or threatened death or serious injury."

Haidt and Haslan point out something I've long recognized: Self-proclaimed victims get status out of their victimhood (as well as unearned power over those they accuse of victimizing them).

Accordingly, I experienced something outrageous yesterday.

I was in the green room at a big event, waiting for Gregg to show up, and editing pages from a chapter I'm working on for my next book.

I'd chosen a two-person table (instead of sitting down with a group at a big table, which I would otherwise have done -- being a friendly person and an extrovert).

It was a crowded room where I could tune out the din just fine (because our brains do that). Then, all of a sudden, some guy sits down at the table behind me -- right behind me -- and starts having a loud cellphone call.

I waited for it to pass. And waited, and waited.

Because I was an invited guest at the event (and grateful for that and not wanting to cause any problems for the organizers), I eventually just turned around and gave him a look a couple times (which most people seem to understand as "Hey, I'm bothered by your call" -- that is, people whose orientation is as mine is: caring about being considerate of other people).

This guy, amazingly, called out to me -- accused me of being disturbed by him because he is "the only brown person."

The thought that actually rose up in my mind that I (as an invited guest) didn't speak: "No, it's because you're the only asshole."

Who gets yakkitying on their cellphone loudly and assumes that somebody's giving them a look out of, yes, racism?!

Assuming this knowing zero about the person they're accusing.

This was particularly hilarious because the guy didn't look "brown." And I think he was upset when I told him I had no idea he was "brown" and that he looked white, just like me. (Truth is, nobody's quite as white as I am -- I have barely gone outdoors all year while writing this book -- but you get my drift.)

I tried to politely explain the science to him. (Though I thought his leap to "brown hate!" was ludicrous, I don't like to be a source of hurt for people, and who likes to be falsely accused of being a racist?)

Here's some of what I tried to tell him -- which I laid out in "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck" -- on how a one-sided conversation is interruptive in to the brain in a way a two-sided call is not.

A public cell phone call is an invasion of mental privacy.

Cellboors in restaurants and coffeehouses will often justify shoving their conversations on us by sneering, "What's the difference whether two people are sitting at a table talking or one person's talking to somebody on the other end of the country?" There is a difference. Research by University of York psychologist Andrew Monk and colleagues showed that a one-sided conversation commandeers the brain in a way a two-sided conversation does not, apparently because your brain tries to fill in the side of the conversation you can't hear. (It doesn't help that people tend to bark into their cell phones in the way white men in cowboy movies talked to Indians.)

A team at Cornell led by then grad student Lauren Emberson deemed these one-sided conversations "halfalogues" and rein- forced Monk's findings when they tested halfalogues made up of gibberish words against those with words that could be understood. They found that when the words spoken were incomprehensible, the brain drain was removed; there were no costs imposed on bystanders' attention. So, although many see public cell phone yakking as a noise issue, which it often is, it's the words being spoken that are the real problem. Basically, even if somebody on a cell phone is trying to keep their voice down, they're probably giving many around them an irritating case of neural itching.

This mind-jacking is an annoying side effect of the very useful human capacity to predict what others are thinking and feeling and use that information to predict how they'll behave. This is called "mental state attribution" or "theory of mind" (as in, the theory you come up with about what's going on in somebody else's mind). When you see a man looking deep into a woman's eyes, smiling tenderly and then getting down on one knee, your understanding and experience of what this usually means helps you guess that he's about to ask "Will you marry me?" and not "Would you mind lending me a pen?"

Unfortunately, this mind-reading ability isn't something we can turn on and off at will. "It's . . . pretty much automatic," blogged University of Pennsylvania linguist Mark Liberman. "You can't stop yourself from reading [others'] minds any more than you can stop yourself from noticing the color of their clothes." But when you're only getting half the cues, like from one side of a stranger's cell phone conversation, your brain has to work a lot harder, and it interferes with your ability to focus your thoughts on other things.

Sound a little more plausible than that some girl hates you because you're brown?

For the record -- and I don't want to name this guy, whose identity, to some degree, seems to be built around considering himself a victim -- he is a humanities prof who seems to be of Arab origin, who looks like Ricky Riccardo (whom I always found wildly handsome).

Truly, when I saw him walk past me to sit down my first thought is: "Wow, he's handsome and beautifully dressed."

It was then dismaying when Mr. Handsome started yammering on his cell. I realize that may people don't know about the science I explain in my book, so I will gently explain it if somebody's open to it -- which I did, or rather, tried to. But the guy clung -- like a rat on driftwood -- to his knee-jerk assumption that I was some KKK-type chiquita, hating him for his "brownness."

Meanwhile, because I hate "brown people," my previous assistant was named Farasati (Iranian origin) and was about six shades "browner" than this guy, and I adored him.

To work for me, I don't care what sex or color you are (assistants have been black, white, Korean, gay, straight, male and female) or whether you've been in jail (current assistant, whom I love the hell out of). Also, I have, in my last two ads, encouraged physically disabled people to apply, since I work with my assistant over Skype (making this an ideal job for somebody who has a hard time getting to a workplace).

And, regarding this guy, really, what sort of person is yakking into their cell and somebody near them looks annoyed, and their first thought is "She hates me for my color!" -- and especially when they're somebody you'd see and think, "White guy!"

It is psychologically easier than being accountable. And again, proclaiming oneself a victim is a way to unearned status.

And back to Haslam's paper (full text here):

12) IMPLICATIONS OF CONCEPT CREEP Those drawn to a pessimistic assessment of these changes might argue that the expanding meaning of concepts such as abuse, bullying, and mental disorder is creating a culture of weakness, fragility, and excuse-making, in which everyone is a victim and no one is responsible for their predicament.

...Understanding what drives this trend and evaluating its costs and benefits are important goals for people who care about psychology's place in our cultures. Equally important is the task of deciding whether the trend should be encouraged, ignored, or resisted. Ultimately this question depends on whether we would be content for most interpersonal frictions to be ascribed to abuse and bullying, for everyday stresses to be described as traumas and habits as addictions, for mental disorder to be more common than its absence, and for prejudice to be seen as a constant undercurrent in social life.