Directory:The Wikipedia Point of View/Neurolinguistic programming

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Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) began as an alternative school of psychotherapy in California, USA, during the mid-seventies. It was initiated by John Grinder, a linguistic professor, Richard Bandler, a mathematician (later a drug addict arrested for First degree murder in 1988), at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC). It is now marketed as a powerful method or technique of personal development that allows a person rapidly to improve the way they think, behave or feel [1]. It is supposed to work by copying or "modelling" the behaviour and thinking styles of particularly effective and successful people in business, education, sales, therapy, sport, and personal development.

Detractos argue that it is a hotch–potch of theories, some of which are based on legitimate science, but which have no connection with NLP, others of which are completely unscientific, including hypnosis, psychotherapy and unconscious thinking, mixed up into a messy soup of new age thinking.

NLP is really a brand that sells the promise of unlimited potential by access to subconscious engrams, and body language cues derived from the observation of “therapeutic wizards”. For example, it claims to ‘model’ the behavioural characteristics observed in top performers in their subject (typically top performers in businesses and corporations) on the assumption that copying these 'behaviours' will lead to success in business. See e.g. here.

The word 'model' should not be confused with a scientific 'model'. A scientific model is a representation of the world which has explanatory power. It is not a mere list of conditions: a successful model must explain reality with the minimum number of assumptions (for example the geocentric model of Ptolemy contains many more assumptions than the heliocentric Copernican one, which rapidly superseded it).

Techniques include behavior change, transforming beliefs, and treatment of traumas through techniques such as reframing and "meta modeling" proposed for exploring the personal limits of belief as expressed in language. It has been applied to a number of fields such as sales, psychotherapy, communication, education, coaching, sport, business management, interpersonal relationships, seduction, occult and spirituality.

NLP training

No university offers a course in NLP.

It is much favoured by trainers for its childish tricks for classroom courses.


Scientific Research on NLP

The Principal Clinical Psychologist for Sheffield Health Authority, Dr Michael Heap, looked at 70 papers on NLP, to examine its theoretical underpinning - Primary Representational System (PRS). This is the claim that we think in a specific mode: visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, olfactory or gustatory (first three being the most common). Thus NLP trainers would now diagnose me as olfactory, as keywords (predicates) are central to the theory, along with eye movements. The claim is that rapport can be enhanced using these techniques, therefore fooling people into doing what you want; working harder, buying your product etc.

Heap looked at the scientific literature and found that PRS is not serious science. He found that 'keywords' are not indicators in the way NLP practioners claim and ‘eye movement’ theories are, in particular, widely rejected. On ‘establishing rapport’, again Heap found that there was no scientfic evidence for the claim that these techniques improve rapport. In a famous study, Cody found that NLP therapists, using language matching, were actually rated as untrustworthy and ineffective. Heap concludes that NLP is “found to be lacking” and that “there is not, and never has been, any substance to the conjecture that people represent their world internally in a preferred mode which may be inferred from their choice of predicates and from their eye movements”.

David Platt, drawing from the German NLP research website http://www.nlp.de found that

1. There was no bona fide evidence to support the use of representational systems and concluded that they did not appear to play any significant role in communication.

2. Use of predicates had little to no influence in building or enhancing rapport.

3. Eye-accessing cues appeared to have no significant positive or negative impact when utilised in personal interactions.

Serious linguists will have nothing to do with the theory as its linguistic components were debunked long ago. Corballis says that "NLP is a thoroughly fake title, designed to give the impression of scientific respectability. NLP has little to do with neurology, linguistics, or even the respectable subdiscipline of neurolinguistics".

Beyerstein accuses NLP of being a total con, new-age fakery to be classed alongside scientology and astrology and many experts in management science are uncomfortable with its being mentioned alongside management theory. Sanghera, in the FT, described NLP as ‘pop-psychology’, ‘pseudoscience’ and ‘banal’. It has been called training’s ‘astrology’.


  • Heap (1988, 1989)
  • Krugman (1985)
  • Corbalis (1999)
  • Beyerstein (1990).

Neurolinguistic programming in Wikipedia

Authorship of Wikipedia articles is governed by the Neutral Point of View policy. This is a well-designed policy, and in theory it will work, so long as all those who understand it and can be bothered to put hard work into the article (experts, academics, researchers, professional scientists). But it clearly has not worked in certain areas. Consider the NLP article as it was in Wikipedia on 31 December 2005, with the version of as of 17 December 2007. The 2005 version says that "Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) is a collection of self-help recommendations, promoted through the popular psychology and self development sections of bookshops, and advertised in various media including the Internet and infomercials.", and that "NLP has been criticized in reviews of research by scientists such as Heap (1988), Sharpley (1987), Lilienfeld (2003), and (Singer & Lalich 1999), which have found that Neuro-linguistic programming is scientifically unsupported and largely ineffective. " You will not find this in the introduction to the 2007 version.


Neurolinguistic programming receives probably more attention in Wikipedia than any other apparently scientific subject. The following articles were all started by, and mainly written by FT2.

References

  • Donald Clarke "NLP – training’s shameful, fraudulent cult " Archived here
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