Nicholas Haslam - Psych Concepts Creep Into Our Everyday Experiences
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Mad in America
4.7 • 212 Ratings
🗓️ 13 April 2022
⏱️ 39 minutes
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Summary
He received his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania and taught at the New School for Social Research in New York City before returning to Australia. His books include Psychology in the Bathroom, Introduction to Personality and Intelligence, Yearning to Breathe Free: Seeking Asylum in Australia, and Introduction to the Taxometric Method.
In addition to his academic writing, Nick regularly contributes to The Conversation, Inside Story, and Australian Book Review. He has also written for TIME, The Monthly, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Australian, and two Best Australian Science Writing anthologies. Nick is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the Association for Psychological Science.
In this interview, he discusses inflating concepts around harm and their effects on ourselves, our experience, and society at large. He also talks about his work on stigma and biogenetic explanations of mental disorders, calling it a mixed blessing.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Mad in America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry and social justice. |
| 0:13.8 | Hello everyone and welcome to Mad in America. This is your host for today, Ayyadidhar. |
| 0:18.4 | I am an assistant professor of psychology at Mount Mary |
| 0:21.4 | University and a spotlight interviewer for Mad in America. Our guest for today is Professor Nick Haslam. |
| 0:28.1 | Dr. Haslam is Professor of Psychology at the University of Melbourne. He has written nine books and has |
| 0:33.6 | published more than 250 articles and book chapters. |
| 0:40.9 | Dr. Haslam's work is expansive and his interests are diverse. |
| 0:43.9 | He has written about personality, dehumanization, |
| 0:48.4 | but today we will talk about his work in the field of psychiatric classification, |
| 0:52.5 | biogenic explanations and stigma, and a lot more. |
| 0:55.7 | Dr. Haslam, Nick, welcome to Matt in America. |
| 1:01.9 | Thanks so much for having me. All right, so let's dig in. You are most well known for your work on concept creep. Could you quickly just tell us what it is? And more than that, how did you end |
| 1:07.9 | up being interested in this? Well, that's a long story, but I'll keep it brief. |
| 1:12.6 | Look, concept creep as I define it, is the tendency for concepts to do with harm, suffering, |
| 1:20.2 | maltreatment, things like that, to expand their meanings over time. |
| 1:23.4 | So what I write about when I talk about concept creep is how over a period of decades, some of the concepts we use come to refer to a wider range of things. |
| 1:34.2 | So to give you an example, bullying is the harmed concept as I see it. |
| 1:39.3 | And 40 or 50 years ago, bullying referred only to certain kinds of peer aggression carried out by children, |
| 1:46.9 | where it was intentional behaviour that was repeated multiple times and done in the context of a power imbalance. |
| 1:54.1 | But over time, people have come to use bullying to refer to a much wider range of phenomena. |
| 1:59.0 | For instance, bad behaviour in workplaces among |
| 2:01.9 | adults, not just bad behaviour by children in playgrounds, behaviour that isn't repeated, |
... |
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