0 Nlp Versus Real Science

It's hard to study magical literature these days without coming across ideas from neuro-linguistic programming, a methodology developed in the 1970's by Richard Bandler and John Grinder that has been picked up by a number of successful contemporary motivational speakers. While these speakers command big money teaching NLP techniques, most of the scientific analysis that I've reviewed of the system has found its claims to be dubious or at best inconclusive. One of the most widely disseminated NLP claims has to do with the supposed relationship between thoughts and eye movements. NLP teaches that when imagining an event, right-handed people tend to look up and to their right, while when remembering an event they tend to look up and to their left. Proponents of the system have taken this idea and run with it, claiming that it can work as a simple form of lie detection - the idea being that a liar is imagining an event, whereas a truth-teller is remembering one. This concept is widely promulgated on the Internet, but scientific studies demonstrating the relationship have never been tracked down. On the contrary, studies undertaken to test NLP claims have pretty consistently failed to support them. This new study, testing the relationship between lying and eye movement, proved to be no exception.

In short, all three studies provided no evidence to support the notion that the patterns of eye-movements promoted by many NLP practitioners aid lie detection. This is in line with findings from a considerable amount of previous work showing that facial clues (including eye movements) are poor indicators of deception . Future research could focus on why the belief has become so widespread. Study 2 assessed the possibility that those who have been told about the claimed relationship between eye-movements and lying feel especially confident in their ability to detect deception, but this hypothesis was not supported by the data. An alternative possibility is that people believe the eye-movement/lying relationship because they are prone to illusory correlations. According to this idea, people will be likely to remember the times that the pattern predicted lying or truth-telling, and forget instances when this was not the case [16], [17]. Future work could examine this hypothesis by examining whether such matches are indeed especially memorable.

This work is the first to experimentally test the claims made by NLP practitioners about lie detection. The results provide considerable grounds to be skeptical of the notion that the proposed patterns of eye-movements provide a reliable indicator of lying. As such, it would seem irresponsible for such practitioners to continue to encourage people to make important decisions on the basis of such claims.

There are many people I have encountered in the magical community who are proponents of NLP. In fact, Bandler and Grinder's original published books describing the foundation of the system were titled "The Structure of Magic I" and "The Structure of Magic II". The idea that NLP represents a sort of scientific approach to the psychological aspects of magick is compelling, but unfortunately most of the "science" I've seen that it claims to be based on is either taken out of context, misinterpreted, or generalized far beyond its original scope. The "neuro" in NLP is essentially meaningless, and while "linguistic programming" might be a reasonable description of the method there is actually little evidence that thought and language are anywhere near as intertwined as NLP claims. Personally, I don't think in words or even symbols unless I make a specific effort to do so, and from that perspective it's ridiculously easy to see the flaws in most linguistic models of cognition. Since the flow of information in society is mediated by language, it seems to me that NLP-like methods would be more applicable to programming interpersonal and especially mass-media communication. Of course, people who do that for a living just call it advertising.

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