„NEURO-LINGUISTIC programming (NLP) is a

popular form of inter-personal skill and communicati-

on training. Originating in the 1970s, the technique

made specific claims about the ways in which indivi-

duals processed the world about them, and quickly

established itself, not only as an aid to communication,

but as a form of psychotherapy in its own right. Today,

NLP is big business with large numbers of training

courses, personal development programmes,

therapeutic and educational interventions purporting to

be based on the principles of NLP. This paper explores

what NLP is, the evidence for it, and issues related to

its use. It concludes that after three decades, there is

still no credible theoretical basis for NLP, resear-

chers having failed to establish any evidence for its

efficacy that is not anecdotal.“ (Gareth, 2009, p. 58

[emphasis added])

„ONE COULD argue that to refute NLP is to engage

in argumentum ad ignorantiam. However, NLP singu-

larly fails to stand up to scrutiny concerning its face

validity and its construct validity. NLP’s predictive

validity is more difficult to ascertain as proponents of

the ‘discipline’ engage in academic goal-post shifting

and arguments about its ‘constructivist’ nature. Claims

about what NLP can do persist though and as such it is

analogous to Bertrand Russell’s celestial teapot with

the burden of proof to support its theoretical founda-

tions and efficacy as an intervention lying with its

proponents. The physicist Richard Feynman coined the

term ‘cargo cult science’ (Feynman, 1985). In the

South Seas there is a cargo cult of people who, during

war-time, observed lots of airplanes carrying goods.

They wanted the planes to continue to land after the

war ended and so set about reconstructing airports with

fires alongside the runway, a wooden hut for the air

traffic controller to sit in and antennas made of bam-

boo. Despite the form of the airport being right, the

planes didn’t land! Feynman adapted the idiom of

‘cargo cult science’ to refer to research that follows all

the form and pretence of scientific investigation yet is

missing something essential. To adapt this term one

more time, NLP masquerades as a legitimate form

of psychotherapy, makes unsubstantiated claims

about how humans think and behave, purports to

encourage research in a vain attempt to gain credi-

bility, yet fails to provide evidence that it actually

works. Neuro-linguistic programming is cargo cult

psychology.“ (Gareth, 2009, p. 62 [emphasis added])

„The analysis of the NLP Research Data Base (state of

the art) by all measures was like peeling an onion. To

reach its core, first I had to remove some useless lay-

ers, and once I arrived, I was close to tears. Today,

after 35 years of research devoted to the concept, NLP

reminds one more of an unstable house built on the

sand rather than an edifice founded on the empirical

rock. In 1988 Heap passed a verdict on NLP. As the

title of his article indicated, it was an interim one. In

the conclusions he wrote: If it turns out to be the case that these therapeutic pro-

cedures are indeed as rapid and powerful as is claimed,

no one will rejoice more than the present author. If

however these claims fare no better than the ones al-

ready investigated then the final verdict on NLP will

be a harsh one indeed (p.276). I am fully convinced

that we have gathered enough evidence to announce

this harsh verdict already now.“ (Tomasz, 2010, p.

65 [emphasis added])

„Have I made my point? To be able to make with any

confidence any single one of these claims about the

human mind and behaviour would necessitate an

enormous amount of honest systematic work, the gat-

hering together of mass of data, and the deployment of

not a little ingenuity. In the absence of such effort and

diligence, it would be dishonest and perverse to use

these claims as teaching material, particularly when the

trainees are people who earn their living by ministering

to the welfare or education of others. Knowledge is

power. Anyone making these kinds of claims is ma-

king a claim for some kind of power. With power

should come accountability. Accountability in this

case is making the evidence available for public

scrutiny. Exactly how were the observations made?

What exactly was observed – can we look at the data

please? How was the reliability of the observations

established? How were the data processed in order to

arrive at the conclusions? And so on. None of this is

disclosed to us.“ (Heap, 2008, pp. 6-7 [emphasis ad-

ded]), (Cf. Heap, 1988), (Cf. Grant, 2005; Norcross, Koocher, & Garofalo,

2006; Pratkanis, 1995; Wiseman et al., 2012)

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