Broadened Concepts of Harm Appear Less Serious

Abstract

Harm-related concepts have progressively broadened their meanings to include less severe phenomena, but the implications of this expansion are unclear. Across five studies involving 1,819 American participants recruited on MTurk or Prolific, we manipulated whether participants learned about marginal, prototypical (severe), or mixed examples of workplace bullying (Studies 1 and 3a), trauma (Studies 2 and 3b), or sexual harassment (Study 4). We hypothesized that exposure to marginal examples of a concept would lead participants to view the harm associated with it as less serious than those exposed to prototypical examples ( trivialization hypothesis). We also predicted that mixing marginal examples with prototypical examples would disproportionately reduce perceived seriousness ( threshold shift hypothesis). All studies supported the trivialization hypothesis, but threshold shift was not consistently supported. Our findings suggest that broadened concepts of harm may dilute the perceived severity and urgency of the harms they identify.