Melanie Joy McGrath

• University of Melbourne

Reducing the spread of infectious viruses (e.g., COVID-19) can depend on societal compliance with effective mitigations. Identifying factors that influence adherence can inform public policy. In many cases, public health messaging has become highly moralized, focusing on the need to act for the greater good. In such contexts, a person's moral ident...

In this project we: 1. Presented a conceptual framework to classify the many available strategies to promote workplace gender equality and discuss their legitimacy. 2. Produced five novel reviews of the academic literature to systematise evidence on the effectiveness of different strategies in achieving change in the workplace gender equality indic...

Reducing the spread of infectious viruses (such as COVID-19) can depend on societal compliance with effective mitigations. Identifying factors that influence adherence can inform public policy. In many cases public health messaging has become highly moralized, focusing on the need to act for the greater good. In such contexts, a persons’ moral iden...

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 work...

Stylistic changes in academic psychology writing were examined in a corpus of 790,520 psychology journal article abstracts published between 1970 and 2016. We anticipated that changing linguistic norms of scientific writing and rising pressures to publish and promote research findings would be evident in increasing levels of personal pronoun use an...

Over the past century the concept of trauma has substantially broadened its meanings in academic and public discourse. We document four directions in which this semantic expansion has occurred: from somatic to psychic, extraordinary to ordinary, direct to indirect, and individual to collective. We analyse these expansions as instances of ‘concept c...

Three studies (Ns = 350, 301 & 341) examined the reliability, validity, and correlates of a new measure of harm inflation, the individual differences counterpart of ‘concept creep’. The Harm Concept Breadth Scale (HCBS) assesses variability in the expansiveness of concepts of harm (i.e., bullying, mental disorder, prejudice, trauma), such that thes...

“Concept creep” is the gradual semantic expansion of harm-related concepts such as bullying, mental disorder, prejudice, and trauma. This review presents a synopsis of relevant theoretical advances and empirical research findings on the phenomenon. It addresses three fundamental questions. First, it clarifies the characterisation of concept creep b...

Taxometric procedures have been used extensively to investigate whether individual differences in personality and psychopathology are latently dimensional or categorical (‘taxonic’). We report the first meta-analysis of taxometric research, examining 317 findings drawn from 183 articles that employed an index of the comparative fit of observed data...

Research on ‘concept creep’ argues that harm-related concepts such as abuse, bullying, prejudice, and trauma have expanded their meanings in recent decades. Theorists have suggested that this semantic expansion may have mixed implications. Broadened concepts might problematize harmful behavior that was previously tolerated but might also make peopl...

Trends in the cultural salience of morality across the 20th century in the Anglophone world, as reflected in changing use of moral language, were explored using the Google Books (English language) database. Relative frequencies of 304 moral terms, organized into six validated sets corresponding to general morality and the five moral domains propose...

Words and word stems employed in each moral foundation and general morality dictionary. (DOCX)

Recruit Smarter trialled four pilot interventions across a range of government departments and private sector organisations. The four interventions included two trials of targeted recruitment via modified language use in job advertisements, a CV de-identification program, and the provision of training to address unconscious bias. The pilot program...