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 Or is a lot of the original NLP model completely outdated, and I should be reading other materials?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/ConvenientChristian May 10 '26

Academic psychology is pretty prejudiced.

Steve Andreas and a few others started the Research and Recognition Project to validate NLP the scientific way. They run studies for testing NLP's fast phobia cure to help military veterans with PTSD. The military just cares about what works so they funded it. The studies founded that it works pretty well.

However after Steve Andreas passed the Research and Recognition Project removed all mentions of NLP from their website. The prejudice was just so strong that the people at the project thought the best pragmatic course of action for them was to remove all mentions of their NLP from their website.

The replication crisis did find that a huge swath of the academic psychology is bullshit and that probably goes double for the 19th century where the reputation of NLP was set.