Neuro-Linguistic Programming: Does it do anything?

[reddragdiva]

... No.

The theory doesn't hold, so if you want to build further theory on it you're out of luck. (Wikipedia summarises the problems pretty well: the models are provably incorrect, it appears oddly hard to teach and communicate, and advocates even try claiming science is inadequate to analysing it.)

The master hack for getting people to do what you want is confidence: simply, to confidently tell them to do what you want. NLP works insofar as having a theory at all, even an erroneous one, increases your confidence. And what NLP actually sells is getting people to do what you want. So NLP delivers what it's selling. Sort of.

(I said "simple," not "easy." But that is the actual answer.)

Many other such marketed mental hacks work the same way, including ones that sell themselves as therapies rather than control techniques. They pretty much all work by applied confidence. Some with an admixture of exploiting cognitive biases.

If you don't buy that and think I'm just mired in pseudosceptic negativity, you could always try using NLP for weight loss, psoriasis or to cure cancer.

Comments

[rbarclay]

NLP, in practice, is just a set of hacks that work often enough so you can manipulate other people to do what you want. Not one of the disciples knows why those hacks mostly work, and 99.9% don't give any damn whatsoever as long as it gets them what they want.

(Note: it helps to have at least a passing familiarity of the whole "process", so you can spot when one of the idiots does try to manipulate you, and you can then send them "signals" that really fuck up their day. Works best in "group" or "team building" exercises in a work setting.)

[reddragdiva]

Yeah, that'll be the cognitive hacks.

Businesses are notorious suckers for any bollocks that works by the projection of confidence and promises big results. And, of course, the Pick-Up Artist field. (Though at least they acknowledge "confidence" is the actual goal.)

I shudder that you work in an environment such that there is enough of such bollocks to give it entertainment value.

[rbarclay]

Oh, I have the "joy" of experiencing "trained" NLP disciples about every year or other. But I get a sick pleasure out of annoying the hell out of them with sending completely messed-up "signals", like crossing my arms but leaning forward whilst looking extremely attentive. Or looking up when thinking about an answer to some stupid quiz question (their cue for "optical-oriented persona") whilst giving their body-language signal for "solely functioning on emotions". Or (usually near the end of their spiel when they're into boasting of how great NLP is, and how great therefore they themselves are) throwing a decently-audible "your body-language looks about as fake as can be done, I think it's time for a little more train-the-trainer" into the ring.

Once, about a decade ago, I had a colleague with also some experience in these matters, and together we managed to send the trainer off weeping ("but we were just wondering aloud about the ethics of consciously manipulating other people, honest!") - I still bask in the glory of that memory.

And yeah, marketing types/sellers and politicians are about the target group of the whole field. Scam artists just come to it naturally.

[redcountess]

So the whole body language thing is part of NLP? I ask because I tend to look away from someone when I am thinking and it tends to look like I'm lying.

[rbarclay]

As far as I gathered, having a good long glance at what my mother was taught when she fell for the spiel 20 or 25 years ago, and from what I gathered alongside in the meantime: there are "cues" as to a persons "type" in all of body-language, used words, eye movement and bodily contact (rare in our society). The "type" can be either emotional, optical, lingual or touchy (this doesn't translate well from german, sorry, but it means something like physical contact/sensations). Each type's not 100% in one of those, but always a mixture, but with a main ingredient of one of those bases.

One method to sort a person into a type is eye-movement.
IIRC it's if you look up, you're optical, if you look down, emotional (tip: make sure you stare the fuckwit straight into the eyes, with your eyes wiiiiide open - they can't sort that, NLP has no concept for it). Body-language is classical: leaning back, arms (&maybe legs) crossed means you're going into defensive mode, leaning forward a bit means attentiveness and so on (tip: mix your signals). Look at a politician on the telly with the sound down and you have all the rest. Lingual type is if you use "looks like" a lot, you're a visual type, if you use "feels like" a lot ... you can guess the rest if your IQ is above amoeba-level.

That's what you learn if you sit through a couple introductory courses - read: victim-level.

In "trainer" mode, you learn more about the mixed types, and how to tell the victim-level people what to do and how you get them to recognize your own greatness. So, exactly the same, but with added confidence (and the victims give you money - and if you do it right, it'll exceed what you paid yourself for trainer level).

I guess you can recognize the roots of that.

(I've probably got some detail wrong, I'm pretty much drunk.)

[reddragdiva]

Not the whole thing - there is such a thing as body language, but it's culture-specific (Australian body language is part of its stereotype, for example). NLP makes spurious claims about it.

[reddragdiva]

Actually, NLP's claimed magical cognitive 'sploits don't work, because the model is provably wrong - the one hack that actually works is confidence.

There are other fields of bullshit that use cognitive hacks better, though even those tend not to call a spade a shovel (not the way advertising, sales or politics do).

[rbarclay]

Looking at the wikipedia entry for "cognitive biases" - NLP has looked at such a list, too, and thought "yeah, sounds exploitable, can-do!". And there you are.

Anchoring, f'rex, is in ("applying anchors" is a Big Part of NLP).
Bias blind spot, in.
Denomination effect, in, esp. in sales (it's not "300 bucks" in their diction, it's "just a couple of 10-buck notes and bit of small change" - xx.99 anyone?).
Distinction bias, in.
Endowment effect, in.
Focusing effect, in (they even call it "focusing", when applied to victims - "focus them on the positive parts").

I couldn't bear to scroll down.

[quiet000001]

Well, damn, here I had a liver biopsy and all I needed was the right person to talk to me?

(Shall we ignore the fact that there's a known link between psoriasis and stress, so it's entirely possible that basically reducing someone's stress about the disease by way of convincing them that it was 'cured' might result in an improvement in the severity? Or how about the fact that it's not a fixed-state condition to start with? My skin has changed dramatically in the past over the course of a couple of days due to stress, illness, and several times who-the-hell-knows-what. In fact, my skin getting worse relatively suddenly is one of the indicators I use to determine if I should probably see a doctor about being sick.)

[reddragdiva]

There's a vast gulf between "a reduction in stress helped me personally with problem X" (which happens to a lot of people with a lot of problems) and "NLP is a reliable treatment to advocate to people in general for this physical problem." Given NLP's model doesn't work, the latter is medical charlatanry even if the charlatan is sincere.

[quiet000001]

Oh, yes, I was referring to the NLP people pretending like they have some magic cure when really, if stress is contributing significantly to the severity of the condition, then ANY stress reduction method that works for the individual is likely to produce similar results. (Which I, personally, would also not consider a 'cure' since stress is only one component of all of the crazy wacky things going on when you have an autoimmune condition.)

I've run into people convinced that meditation 'cured' their psoriasis and I'm willing to guess that it's the exact same mechanism - they're doing something they believe will help and that will reduce stress, and so their stress levels drop, and you get a drop in inflammation levels in the body as a result and Magically the symptoms improve.

(Plus, often stuff like getting into meditation is linked to lifestyle changes like switching detergents and body products, and residue in clothing and sheets or detergents or perfumes in body products can definitely be topical irritants that contribute to the severity, and some dietary changes help some people... There's a whole load of stuff going on that's likely contributing to any improvement.)

(To say nothing of the fact that psoriasis as a condition can effectively go into remission spontaneously from time to time, or with significant changes like getting pregnant - it's not at all uncommon for women who get pregnant who have psoriasis to see changes in the severity, or for women who haven't had it before to have it turn up during the pregnancy and go away after, never to be seen again.)

TL;DR version: Psoriasis is WAY too complicated in terms of what MIGHT be influencing the severity for anyone to convince me that something will result in a significant improvement without a properly conducted and repeated medical trial. (And even then, chances are it will only work for a certain percentage of the population who have psoriasis, since that seems to be what they're finding with drug treatments.)

Also, people who come up to me and tell me that I'd be magically cured if I only did X make me grumpy. :) So no support for NLP people from this corner.

(Personally, I'm not going to consider anything an actual CURE for psoriasis unless they manage to actually fix the defect that makes the immune system misbehave in the first place. Anything else, even the targeted drugs on the market now, is just a treatment. Thankfully, some of them are exceptionally effective treatments, but at the end of the day, if you go off treatment, chances are sooner or later the symptoms will turn up again because the problem is still there.)

(And I think people who sell 'miracle cures' to people with severe psoriasis and draw them away from effective medical treatment should be ashamed of themselves - there's more and more evidence coming out that having chronic inflammatory conditions like psoriasis significantly increase your risks for cardiac problems and things like diabetes, so while I don't agree with forcing someone to undergo some of the treatments available if they don't want to, I feel VERY strongly that they should be properly informed of the long term implications of having this type of autoimmune condition so they in turn can make sure future doctors are informed, make educated decisions about treatment risks, etc.)

[reddragdiva]

It's similar to the ethics of using homeopathy on someone. Is it ethical to lie to your patient in the hope of invoking the placebo effect? Is it ethical to pay someone who doesn't think they're lying to lie to your patient?

[quiet000001]

are you telling me homeopathy doesn't work? It doesn't really change the vibrations of the water molecules? *gasp*

(Or whatever the hell it is they claim anyway. I don't even understand how they think it works.)

(Slightly unrelated, but one of my favorite things to come up when you start getting alternative/herbal medication types going on about how drugs are evil and natural is better is when one of the natural is better types starts recommending things like willow bark tea. Because when it comes from a tree in a uncertain strength, it's fine, but when it comes from a production line with a lab with quality control checks to make sure each tablet has X amount, and goes into a bottle marked "aspirin" it's suddenly EVIL. Wtf?)

[mouseworks]

I have a friend here who is seriously in to herbal medicines. Here is Nicaragua where some of the herbs are quite powerful (often rather poisonous), so the placebo effect is something like "all the toxins leave your system and get purged, so you will feel some pain but that's the medicine working." What I've heard from her is "when bacteria become resistant to modern drugs, we'll have to go back to herbal medicine." Yes, and we'll die of infections just like we did before antibiotics.

Couple of things now set off my bullshit detectors

[mouseworks]

Libertarian politics
Wholistic
Sustainable agriculture
Helping the people coming from people who basically don't have crucial skills that most of the locals don't have (most of the locals can weld, build houses, run pipe, grow food, and hustle you for petty change).
Neuro-Linguistic Programming
and Massage Therapy that is Transformative and costs more than $50 a session unless it involves really good sex.

Re: Couple of things now set off my bullshit detectors

[the_siobhan]

The Massage Therapy thing must be regional - a liscenced massage therapist in Toronto usually charges about $60-$80 for an hour. And they don't claim to transform anything except sore muscles into even more sore muscles.

Re: Couple of things now set off my bullshit detectors

[mouseworks]

We have a Transformative Massage Therapist who charges $250 to $350 a two hour session (less to really poor Nicaraguans, he says). He claims to work on the muscle binding caused by emotional pain and stuff. He came from California, originally. See probably Rolfing, and Body Work.

The Nicaraguan people need him to cure them of their emotional pain after the Sandinista/Contra War, he says.

Re: Couple of things now set off my bullshit detectors

[reddragdiva]

You mean "Rolfing® Structural Integration™, of course!

Re: Couple of things now set off my bullshit detectors

[mouseworks]

ROFL. Middle class and upper middle class people too dumb to run factories despite being born privileged need to turn what they're doing into something transformative and very important, not a step down in class. Massage is something the proles can learn how to do, like being a motorcycle mechanic or a jockey. Transformational body work is far more important. It isn't just skilled manual labor; it's healing on a far more massive scale.

Perhaps the arts are a similar hustle, too -- let's take what in most of human history was a skilled artisan's gig that was about giving visual pleasure to the rich and sell it to the marks as something that will heal their souls by doing it. Most artists aren't great examples of people who are marvelously well-balanced human beings, but hey, from a distance, they do look romantic. Money can be made teaching creative confidence to the middle classes.

http://www.mtwashingtonvalley.org/newhampshire/services/transformational-body-therapy.cfm for the general idea on transformational body works.

Imagine a Transformational Body Worker working on a Natural Horseman and the horse. Google Transformational Bodywork Horses.

Obviously, I didn't think about that first.

[rbarclay]

How to spot NLP disciples:

if you suspect there's an NLP disciple in your group, do an easy test.

1. make eye-contact
2. note your own use of "looks like" "feels like" "sounds like"
3. note how they adapt
4. focus on one of "looks" "sounds" "feels"
5. note how they adapt
6. use all of "looks" "sounds" "feels" at once
7. watch their mental model break down
8. fun! maybe add an ad hominem for added emphasis


Over-simplified example:
a. "buy foo, it does z, oh, and x and y, too!"
b. "foo doesn't feel right, because bla"
a. "foo could change x to y, and you would feel better"
b. "this not only feels wrong, it sounds wrong, and also looks wrong."
a. usually breaks down at about now
b. "in fact, your body-language looks and feels fake, and your voice sounds fake, too"
b. "and why are your eyes darting about all of a sudden, looking for an escape?"
b. "guess you need to throw more money at train-the-trainer in your NLP"

[mouseworks]

The cancer cure one really spiked the bullshit meter. I should do a linguistic analysis of things that make verbal performances sound absolutely phony. Even some smart people have been conned into believing that attitude cures cancer, but I can also see that if the doctors say that there's a limited amount they can do for certain cancers, the patient is very vulnerable to anything that might give hope. Given a handful of remissions that happen out of thousands of cases, one of those happening to someone involved in an alternative therapy will look very good (and a large number of people who are told that there's little to be done will probably try alternative therapies). The people who died can be written off as those who didn't do it right, but people have had remissions without anyone doing anything more than cutting them open, taking a look and sewing them back up as "yep, gonna die" cases.

[reddragdiva]

"but I can also see that if the doctors say that there's a limited amount they can do for certain cancers, the patient is very vulnerable to anything that might give hope."

Hence the Cancer Act and similar laws in most first-world countries. I'm surprised they can get away with that page in New Zealand.

[sidhedmento]

People always want magical powers. What can you do?

[the_siobhan]

A friend of mine recommended NLP to me recently as something that really helped him out. I made a mental note to look into it but never got around to it. Looks like it's just as well.

[loosechanj]

Is this that crap I saw once about manipulating people by such methods as copying their mannerisms? It seemed to me that the person doing the manipulating was rather that submissive in the deal.