From: lady@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Lee Lady)
Subject: Re: NLP and what the .... are we talking about???
Followup-To: sci.psychology
Summary: It would be great to have NLP investigated scientifically! 
Keywords:  NLP  NeuroLinguistic Programming
Organization: University of Hawaii (Mathematics Dept)
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1992 07:50:45 GMT

In article <1992Sep30.155604.144713@ua1ix.ua.edu> elane@ho06.eng.ua.edu (Elizabeth Lane) writes:
>In article <1992Sep29.005236.19186@ucc.su.OZ.AU> ben@archsci.arch.su.oz.au (Ben Colbron) writes:
>
>>which underlies them. If the theory is untenable, the results must
>>be brought into question.
>
>Most branches of science and social science are moving toward a rejection
>of that oh-so-postivistic model.   ... 
>
>NLP was created by people who said "Hey, this seems to work, and right now
>we're more interested in helping people who need help than in proving the
>theory to be 'tenable'."

I think that most people with a scientific turn of mind find it a
little unsatisfactory to simply know that something works but to not
know why it works.  It seems only reasonable that the better one
understands what makes something work, the better the chance of making
it work even more effectively.

When scientific psychologists become interested in the ideas behind NLP
and investigate them scientifically, undoubtedly the results will be
beneficial to both sides.  There may be some temporary unhappiness if
NLPers find some of their favorite ideas refuted, but ultimately one will
wind up with a better system.  

However scientific psychology is not an activity that NLPers do (or are
qualified to do).  

It seems to be a tradition among NLP trainers from the time of Bandler
and Grinder to stress the "only a model" point of view.  Two of my
trainers from last summer used almost identical words:  "Remember, we
made all this up.  We don't know if it's true or not.  We only know
that it seems to work."

I think that one reason trainers stress this is to try and prevent NLP
students from turning the ideas of NLP into a belief system, a
quasi-religious dogma.  And I think that there are also times when it's
just a cop-out.  When someone asks "How do you know this?  What's your
evidence that, say, people have a favored representational system?"  the
NLPer can answer "Oh well, that's not important, it's only a model."

The important thing, whether one calls something a model or a scientific
theory or whatever, is that it be testable.  When one says "It's useful,
it works," it's important to be able to show that the use of that model
enables one to find approaches which are effective and which one could
not be expected to come up with if one did not have the model.  

And effectiveness has to be measured in terms of things that are specific
and verifyable.  (In fact, these are part of the "well formedness
conditions" that are taught in most NLP trainings.  A well-formed outcome
in therapy  [changework]  should be "specific and contexualized" and
"verifyable in sensory experience."  

"NLP has made me feel a lot better" or "NLP has changed my life" just
doesn't cut it.  Yes, NLP has done both of these for me and I'm not shy
about telling people so, but that's not really evidence for the
validity of its claims.  Lots of things change people's lives.  Including
religion and sugar cubes.  

As an example of models which are not -- in my opinion -- useful, I'd
like to mention the NLP technique called metaphor.  This simply means
that sometimes telling a subject a story can help them make a desired
change, even though the story has no apparent relation to their problem.
Most NLPers believe this can often work.  Milton Erickson used to do it a
lot.  

I've heard two totally different explanations as to why this works.  The
first is that story-telling by-passes the conscious mind and thereby
by-passes resistance.  The second explanation, which Leslie Cameron
Bandler offered us in a training several years ago, is that beliefs arise
from compelling reference experiences.  And that a vicarious experience
-- something one sees happen to a friend or on a television program or a
story a therapist tells one -- can have just as much impact as an
experience one goes through personally.  

So here are two models, if you will.  And I don't know of anything in NLP
that enables one to decide between these two models.  And it doesn't seem
to me that either model is especially useful.  These are simply 
a postiori explanations for an observed phenomena -- that sometimes it
seems useful for a therapist to deliver a message in the guise of a
narrative.  

>>If NLP 'works' for you - great. I hear religion works sometimes, too.
>>So do sugar pills labelled "aspirin". As a scientific psychologist, however,
>>I am trained not to take such 'results' at face value but to investigate
>>*how* and *why* such phenomena 'work'. 

I think it would be absolutely marvelous if people with training like
yours were in fact to investigate the *how* and *why* of NLP.  

The complaint that you have about NLP is the complaint that I have about
clinical psychology as an academic discipline in general.  There's all
this energy devoted to teaching graduate students experimental design
so that they can do careful studies of various "treatments."  And yet
these treatments are often totally ad hoc (in my opinion).  Sometimes
approaches that seem totally contradictory seem to be equally effective.

As I wrote in a post several months ago, in my opinion psychotherapy
today is in same theoretical state as medicine before Harvey discovered
the circulation of the blood.  And nobody seems to be asking the really
fundamental questions.  

Questions such as:  Why is it that various things make people feel bad?
Where do emotions come from?  Why do people get often get angry when
someone disagrees with them?  Why does a person's mind keep getting drawn
back to something unpleasant such as a traumatic experience, when the
principles of behavioral psychology would suggest that the resulting bad
feelings would function as a punishment to extinquish that behavior?  Why
is it that in therapy one can explain something to a subject in a
convincing rational matter without much impact, but the same thing said
in an irrational way at an emotional moment can come as a revelation?  

I believe that there are some very important scientific ideas in NLP and
some very important scientific questions it raises.  But it's going to
take scientists to investigate them.  I certainly don't expect any
scientist to take anything about NLP at face value.  But it has been my
hope, in posting articles on it for four years now, to make a few
scientists sufficiently curious to at least find out what it's about.

--
It is a poor sort of skepticism which merely delights in challenging
those claims which conflict with one's own belief system.  
                                                          --Bogus quote 
lady@uhunix.uhcc.hawaii.edu         lady@uhunix.bitnet
Newsgroups: sci.psychology