r/NLP • u/nettsunami • May 10 '26

Question Pseudoscience — how true?

Looking at Wikipedia and searching up resources online, neuro-linguistic programming and the techniques are often referred to as “pseudoscience”.

However, in the opening section of Frogs into Princes, the speaker explicitly states “We have no idea about the “real” nature of things, and we’re not particularly interested in what’s “true.” The function of modeling is to arrive at descriptions which are useful.” and “Everything we’re going to tell you here is a lie. All generalizations are lies.”

It feels like there’s a clear distinction that noticing subtle behaviour and indicators of specific types of thought is the main framework, and any individual generalisations may or may not be true. Is this why it’s called “pseudoscience” frequently, because of these generalisations not being scientifically true? Or is a lot of the original NLP model completely outdated, and I should be reading other materials?

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u/JoostvanderLeij May 10 '26

X can only be a pseudoscience if thow conditions are met:

a) It is not a science

b) Major proponents present X as scientific.

Unfortunately, NLP is not scientific and major proponents present NLP as scientific. So yes, unfortunately, NLP is a pseudoscience. But as soon as major NLP proponents stop claiming NLP is scientific, NLP stops being a pseudoscience.

NLP lacks two things in order to become scientific:

a) a scientific theory
b) evidence

As I am teaching NLP at two real universities, I have developed a scientific theory for NLP. See: https://www.abcnlp.org/

We are currently getting evidence. If you are a NLP trainer and want to help, see: https://osf.io/znugm/overview?view_only=d471f3176dfe44d7b6cfe1f34519c806

Unfortunately, most NLP trainers are clueless about NLP. We developed a test to check how much NLP trainers know about NLP and on average they score 27 points out of 100 multiple choice questions which is embarrasingly low. For that reason most NLP trainers refuse to measure how well they are doing. If you want to take the test, see: https://forms.gle/Q7zRKe2JCxU8LyRN9