The "NLP Disproved" Myth

In 1983, an Australian Doctor of Psychology at the University of Monash - Christopher Sharpley - having attended a single NLP training course, decide that it was his duty to expose NLP for what (he thought) it was. This became the basis for a myth that has lasted for over 25 years. The belief that Sharpley's review, and the experiments it related to, had somehow "disapproved [sic] the use of Neuro-linguistic Programming".

Even very recently, (in July 2009, to be precise) an academic at the University of Glamorgan, in the UK, presented a precise of Sharpley's claims in an attempt to demonstrate that "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 credibility, yet fails to provide evidence that it actually works (Dr Gareth Roderique-Davies, Neuro-Linguistic Programming: Cargo Cult Psychology?, Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education, Volume 1, Number 2, 2009. page 62.)

Numerous other academics have also written material which dismisses "NLP" as useless - Grant Devilly, Von Bergen, Singer and Lalich, etc., etc. But there is an underlying flaw in all of this material: much of it depends for its evidence, directly or indirectly, on Sharpley's two articles from 1984 and 1987. But that presents some insurmountable problems:

1. Sharpley had a very poor understanding of the field of NLP, and seems to have believed that matching someone's PRS was pretty much the whole basis for NLP;
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2. Because of the lack of accurate information all round, all of the experimenters whose work Sharpley examined, along with Sharpley himself, failed to spot two crucial facts:
   1. Predicate matching was in fact only one of several NLP-related techniques designed to create and maintain rapport, and
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   2. Bandler and Grinder were already in the process of writing the "preferred representational system" concept out of the NLP-related techniques in early 1978 (when they conducted the seminar which was transcribed and published as Frogs into Princes. Thus, by 1980, let alone by the time Sharpley wrote his articles, all of the so-called evidence was becoming more and more-out-of date.
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3. Sharpley was (and still is) convinced that "NLP" is a form of psychotherapy and demand that it be "scientifically" tested against other forms of therapy.

What is truly remarkable is the way academic psychologuists have continued to cite Sharpley's material for a quarter of a century and yet, in all that time, it seems that few of them if any, with the exception of Einspruch and Forman, have bothered to examine that "evidence" to see if it was itself valid.

Even more telling is the fact that only psychologists seem to think that the field of NLP is all about therapy and therefore needs to be tested against some allegedly "scientific" standard. Academics working in the area of the sociology of religion, such as Hunt and Major, for example, make no such claims, and instead try to identify notional links between their ideas about "NLP" and "some forms of Eastern-oriented" religions. Perhaps not surprisingly, it seems that none of the academic psychologists has yet identified the "eastern-oriented religious" aspects of "NLP".

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