Friday, January 15, 2010

NLP - the cradle of budding quacks?

During my journeys into the dark heart of educational quackery (OK, that's a bit over the top, but I like it), I was struck by how often quacks claim the magic über quack affirmation - NLP Master Practitioner. What should be a source of embarrassment to be mentioned behind closed doors, becomes a beacon to attract the gullible. Which self help guru coined the phrase "... turn the negatives into positives"? NLP is clearly a quacking granfalloon, but it also seems to be the cradle of many budding educational quacks.

Wikipedia is a usually a good source to start reading up on any topic. It is also for Neuro-linguistic Programming. The danger with Wikipedia articles on questionable practices is that they may been be written by practitioners in mufti. In this case Dave Snowden, a critic of NLP, is one of the authors/editors of the article, which makes for a more objective view. It is always instructive to look at the discussions between the authors/editors on the discussion pages of any Wikipedia article. In this case there are interesting discussions between Snowden and some NLP supporters. The discussions range from guardedly civilized to downright hostile.

I'm not going to spend too much time here on NLP, as there's a lot of information on the Web. Here are two useful links:

Wikipedia on NLP.
Barry Beyerstein on pseudoscience.

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Posted by Leon Stander

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3 comments:

  1. Hello from California, Leon. I found your blog through looking for Brain Gym debunking.

    While NLP started in California (I worked on an NLP handbook, I think for teachers, back in the mid-1970s), it didn't seem to catch on here the way it has in the UK and evidently, SA. I'm curious about why that's so.
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  2. Hi Liz

    To my knowledge NLP is not widely spread in South African education, at least at school level. I'm not sure why that would be, certainly teachers are not inclined or equipped to critically evaluate techniques offered to schools. NLP in South Africa was at one stage strongly associated with gimmicks such as firewalking, which may have created suspicion about a link to eastern religious practices. South African education has always had a strong Christian basis, which may have limited NLP influence. That's just speculating.

    Techniques such as Brain Gym, which is widely spread, claim some influence from NLP. I did observe that many practitioners of scientifically questionable approaches do claim to also have NLP credentials. Having said that, I may be subject to confirmation bias, I haven't actually polled the numbers.
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  3. Hi Leon,

    Nice article about NLP. Well, I can say that Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) explores the inner workings of the human mind. NLP presents specific skills and patterns necessary to make positive changes, create new choices, be more effective with others, break free of old habits, self-destructive patterns and behaviours, and think more clearly about what it is we want.

    NLP is the study of the relationship between the mind, language, emotions and patterns of behaviour. It is a psychology of interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence and communication.
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