I did not ‘refute it credibly’, I ‘refuted it’s credibility’; these two statements have profoundly different meanings.
My interest in subjects like these is purely academic; I have no stake nor emotional attachment to it, so to call my opinion ‘partisan’ isn’t fair as I’m not promoting any particular agenda. I am not however willing to accept the credibility of the sources you keep directing at me, as they are all written by people trying to sell me NLP, which leads me to consider them considerably biased. You don’t buy a car based on reviews written by the owner of Volvo - it’s the same principle.
I will however accept articles written by people whose attachment to the subject is academic, particularly ones that show strong evidence of good empirical methodology. Your supporting links have largely just offered anecdotal evidence, which quite frankly is not good enough. Many people will tell you that a tomato is a vegetable, they may even be the majority - but their opinions are merely opinions and this does not make them correct (tomatoes are in fact a fruit).
My favourite academic article is one I have already mentioned as it is a cited reference in the Wikipedia article, and it’s content is quite telling. It’s entitled “Thirty-Five Years of Research on Neuro-Linguistic Programming. State of the Art or Pseudoscientific Decoration?”. This is an interesting study, as it does not perform it’s own NLP study, but it is instead studying academic literature pertaining to the topic and, comparing the journal articles contained in the INLP database to the greater number contained in national databases.
You can read it here, but I will summarise it’s content below.
(http://www.tomaszwitkowski.pl/attachments/File/NLP.pdf)
After qualitative analysis of the 315 articles contained in the NLP database, only 63 of them were determined to be reliable after filtering for credibility. Of those 63, 33 of them contained relevant empirical studies, 14 were of little scientific relevance and the remaining 16 weren’t actually relevant to NLP at all (the author hypothesises that these articles were likely included by accident). Out of the 33 relevant papers, only 9 of them were actually supportive of NLP whereas 18 refuted it (6 had uncertain outcomes). Bear in mind that these are the references cited by the INLP database itself - 9 out of 315 were reliable, contained relevant information and actually supported NLP, this is less than 3% of their own referenced articles.
Qualitative analysis of the national database showed completely different results - to quote the study; “The numbers indicate unequivocally that the NLP concept has not been developed on solid empirical foundations”. If you care to read it, the author also explains why he believes these results to be the case - he notes a common absence of a lack of control group in the small number of supported studies, and more rigorous testing in those that do not.
Indeed, his final statement is pretty damning of some of your specific links:
“The NLP database is commonly invoked by NLP followers and indicated as evidence for the existence of solid empirical grounds of their preferred concept. It is most likely that most of them have never looked through the base. Otherwise they might have come to the conclusion that it provides evidence to the contrary – for the lack of any empirical underpinnings”
At last, a footnote, please don’t insinuate that I am an American; I am not.
