First described by Haslam (2016), concept creep refers to the gradual expansion of the meaning of harm-related concepts. Haslam argued that several prominent psychological concepts had undergone a process of semantic inflation whereby they had come to refer to an increasingly wide range of phenomena. That broadening occurs in two directions, he argued. Concepts creep horizontally by coming to refer to qualitatively new phenomena, and vertically by coming to refer to quantitatively less extreme phenomena.