That Wikipedia page confirms that its widely disrespected, but read the Wikipedia on the actual studies performed. There is supporting research, some of it fairly impressive. The list of ratio of supportive studies to dismissive studies is very much skewed in support of NLP on this wikipedia page.
There are a few issues I see here.
1) NLP sets off big time “SCAM!” flags, since they seem to be trying to use NLP to sell NLP (to idiots).
2) Their theories can be useful, but are still crap. You can test it and “disprove” it by finding a flaw without finding the part that made it useful.
Because of these, it’s going to take work to extract the value that’s there.
3) It’s hard to test things that have more than a couple causal factors. The hypnosis research, which is more respected, falls prey to this all the time. They measure one correlation resulting from a giant mess of factors without holding other factors constant (because they have failed to even identify them) and then are surprised when they cant’ get consistent results for their oversimplified model.
4) “NLP” is being used too loosely. If they do a study that fails to find evidence for one theoretical claim NLP practitioners have made, its is interpreted as “NLP is bullshit”. There are plenty of studies that go that way for various hypnosis theories, but it is interpreted as “Well then, hypnosis must work differently than that”.
I ended up researching “hypnosis” instead of “NLP” because it seemed to be easier to extract useful information on the same subject (though there is still a huge pile of BS to sift through and piece together), but I will say that NLP can teach you to do stuff you couldn’t do before.
Their “fast phobia cure” does work, for example. I’ve done it.
That Wikipedia page confirms that its widely disrespected, but read the Wikipedia on the actual studies performed. There is supporting research, some of it fairly impressive. The list of ratio of supportive studies to dismissive studies is very much skewed in support of NLP on this wikipedia page.
There are a few issues I see here.
1) NLP sets off big time “SCAM!” flags, since they seem to be trying to use NLP to sell NLP (to idiots).
2) Their theories can be useful, but are still crap. You can test it and “disprove” it by finding a flaw without finding the part that made it useful.
Because of these, it’s going to take work to extract the value that’s there.
3) It’s hard to test things that have more than a couple causal factors. The hypnosis research, which is more respected, falls prey to this all the time. They measure one correlation resulting from a giant mess of factors without holding other factors constant (because they have failed to even identify them) and then are surprised when they cant’ get consistent results for their oversimplified model.
4) “NLP” is being used too loosely. If they do a study that fails to find evidence for one theoretical claim NLP practitioners have made, its is interpreted as “NLP is bullshit”. There are plenty of studies that go that way for various hypnosis theories, but it is interpreted as “Well then, hypnosis must work differently than that”.
I ended up researching “hypnosis” instead of “NLP” because it seemed to be easier to extract useful information on the same subject (though there is still a huge pile of BS to sift through and piece together), but I will say that NLP can teach you to do stuff you couldn’t do before.
Their “fast phobia cure” does work, for example. I’ve done it.