NLP LIMPS ALONG WITH SUPPORT FROM GOD™️
Kev asks, “Is NLP still a thing?” and “What’s God got to do with it?”
NLP – or ‘Neurolinguistic programming’ in certain hypnotists’s parlances – is 50 years old this year, taking 1975 as its birth. Funny that something so established and widespread still has to justify itself against scientific scrutiny. Funny, that would be, if it was a genuine psychotherapy; not so funny (in more than one way) if it’s ‘just a scam’.
There are a number of ways of assessing whether NLP “works”, and/or is “scientific”. To do so, however, requires a definition of what NLP is, and that is a slippery fish to get a hold of. If you take a handful of theory and practice that the creators of NLP made a lot of noise about at the beginning, and call that NLP and test that, then, well, people will find ways of saying that isn’t NLP when the results turn out to be unsupportive.
It is entirely possible to test a concept or a therapy intervention scientifically. But when, as is usually the case with NLP, the results come back negative, some supporters of NLP seem to claim that the intervention was delivered incorrectly, or that in the real-world a practitioner would be able to adapt to ‘the patient’. Of course, these are just apologies to explain away the poor effectiveness of the techniques. If a technique requires operator wiggle room, then build that in to the intervention. But if the wiggle room required is to simply persist and throw every technique at the patient until something improves, then that might not be regarded as testing the intervention any more.
There have been a few reviews of NLP over the years and they usually turn out to be unsupportive. The most recent is this one from 2010. In a bid to try to make NLP appear more respectable and more evidence-based, an initiative has been collecting together scientific papers about NLP. These can be found at the NLP Research Database – a website that appears to use Comic Sans font in their header! The 2010 review sifted through the database seeking decent trials and found that there weren’t many (most papers were case studies or uncontrolled experiments), and most of those were unsupportive of NLP.
But, fear not, NLP fan, because a Christian philosopher has teamed up with an NLP trainer to state that they don’t like how science has all these scientific things to say about NLP. They particularly don’t like NLP being called bad science, unscientific, or pseudoscientific. But, what else can you call something built on a flawed understanding of the brain and a wilful avoidance of testing if any of their ideas worked?!?! No, they say, while there may be “NLP-bullshitters” (their phrase), most practitioners of NLP either make no scientific claims or are actively testing NLP scientifically. But their practitioners do claim their therapies work (spoiler: they don’t), which could be regarded as scientific claims.
And if, as the opposite position appears to be, that those NLP practitioners are not making any scientific claims, and therefore any claims of their therapies working, then are they any different to the crystal healers and snake oil salespeople? Odd that a philosopher and NLP trainer would rather join those people than be seen to be making scientific claims.
So, NLP rattles along and people continue to believe in it. At least it’s not a religion.