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

[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.