Three Things I Believed This Week. All Three Had the Same Problem.
I Checked Three Things I Believed This Week. All Three Had the Same Problem.
Learning styles, handwriting, and NLP. None of them were hoaxes. That's what makes the pattern worth knowing.
Let's start with the one that costs the most money.
Neuro-Linguistic Programming. NLP. If you've spent any time in coaching, sales training, leadership development, or personal growth, you've met it, whether or not anyone named it. Reading someone's eye movements. Matching their sensory language. Identifying whether they're a visual, auditory, or kinesthetic person and speaking to them accordingly.
Certifications in it run into the thousands of dollars.
Its most testable claim is the eye movement one: that glancing one direction means you're recalling something and the other direction means you're constructing it, and therefore possibly lying.
In 2012, Richard Wiseman and Caroline Watt tested it three ways. They filmed people lying and telling the truth and coded their eyes, and the movements didn't match the pattern. They told one group about the eye-movement claim and left another group uninformed, then had both try to spot lies, and there was no difference between them. Then they left the lab entirely and coded footage from real press conferences where people were appealing about missing relatives, some of whom turned out to be lying. Nothing again.
Three methods. One answer.
And here's the thing. I don't think the people teaching this are frauds. I think they get results. Which is exactly what makes this worth writing about.
Three in one week
That was the third time in about a week that I'd gone looking for a study and found the same shape underneath.
Learning styles. I taught this as truth for years. The specific claim, which researchers call the meshing hypothesis, is that people learn better when instruction matches their preferred style. A 2008 review by Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer and Bjork went looking for evidence and found one study offering partial support and two that contradicted it. What's real: people differ enormously, and preferences are genuine. What isn't: that matching to the preference improves outcomes.
Handwriting for gratitude. I was told in a course that handwriting your gratitude statements is more impactful than typing them. I believed it instantly, because I already preferred paper. There is no study comparing the two. The gratitude research is substantial, but the variable tested is always gratitude versus neutral writing, never pen versus keyboard. James Pennebaker, who essentially founded expressive writing research, states in his own review that no studies have compared ways of writing on health outcomes.
NLP. Tomasz Witkowski did something clever in 2010. He went to the research database that NLP proponents themselves cite as proof, filtered it down to studies published in credible indexed journals, and analyzed what was left. Of 33 relevant studies, 18.2% supported NLP's claims and 54.5% did not, with the non-supportive ones being methodologically stronger.
Three different fields. Three different weeks of my life. Same shape.
The shape
Something true, plus a story about why it's true that nobody checked.
And the story travels further than the truth, because the story is more useful. The story is what you can teach, certify, brand and sell.
"People are different and richer instruction helps everyone" is a fact.
"There are four learner types and here's how to identify yours" is a product.
None of these are hoaxes. That's the part I keep coming back to. Nobody sat down to invent a lie. In every case there's something real at the center, and then a layer of explanation grew around it that nobody ever tested, because it sounded right and it worked well enough that no one thought to ask.
Why this finds people like us
Here's the finding that made me uncomfortable enough to write this.
In 2012, Sanne Dekker and colleagues surveyed 242 teachers about the brain. On average, the teachers believed 49% of the false statements presented to them. Then this: teachers who read popular science magazines scored higher on general brain knowledge. And higher general brain knowledge predicted increased belief in the myths.
Reading more made people more confidently wrong.
If you are the kind of person who takes the course, reads the book, listens to the podcast, follows the thread, attends the workshop... you are not protected by any of that. You are the target audience. Every framework has to pass through you to reach anyone else, and you're the one absorbing the most of them.
There's a word for these, and I've come to love it: a neuromyth. An idea about how the brain works that sounds scientific, spreads widely, and turns out not to be true. Usually built from a real finding, stretched past what it showed.
Curiosity is how they get in. Curiosity is also the only thing that gets them out. Same trait, both directions.
The part that lets you keep everything
Here's where this turns, and it's the reason I'm writing this as an invitation rather than a warning.
The practice and the explanation come apart.
Go back to NLP. The systematic review by Sturt and colleagues, published in the British Journal of General Practice, includes a passage I've read about ten times now. They note that NLP's individual techniques overlap heavily with established, evidence-based approaches, and they lay out the mapping directly.
Developing rapport is person-centred counselling. Modelling is vicarious learning. Eliciting well-formed outcomes is goal setting. Reframing is a cognitive behavioural therapy technique. Anchoring is classical conditioning.
That explains everything about why NLP persists. Practitioners aren't imagining their results. They're using real techniques that work for reasons that have nothing to do with NLP's theory of the brain.
Reframing is the clearest example. In the research literature, it's called cognitive reappraisal, meaning deliberately generating a different interpretation of a situation in order to change its emotional impact. It has serious meta-analytic support, and it's a core mechanism of cognitive behavioural therapy.
I know from personal experience that cognitive therapy techniques work. I'm not writing this as a skeptic who's never been helped by any of it. I'm writing as someone who has been helped, and who wanted to know which part did the helping.
The map was wrong. Several of the roads are real.
You do not have to choose between believing everything and believing nothing. That's a false choice and it's the reason most people quietly opt out of thinking about this at all.
Three questions
Not a system. Just what I'm carrying now.
What exactly is being claimed, in a form that could turn out to be wrong? This is the one that does the most work. "Learning styles matter" can't be tested. "Matching instruction to a person's preferred style improves their outcomes" can. Vague claims survive forever precisely because there's nothing to check.
Does the technique work, or does the explanation work? These are separable, and once you can see the seam you'll see it everywhere. Keep the technique. Hold the explanation loosely.
And when something confirms what I already believe... did I check, or did I just nod? I nodded at the gratitude claim in about half a second, because it flattered a preference I already had. That half second is where all of this lives.
The honest limit
You cannot verify everything. I can't either. Nobody has that kind of time, and a version of this article that tells you to fact-check your entire life is useless, in my humble opinion.
So here's the line I've landed on, and it's proportional rather than absolute.
Check the things you're about to teach someone else.
Believe what you like on your own time. Use what works for you. But the moment you're about to put a framework in front of a client, a team, an audience, a child... that's when it's worth twenty minutes finding out whether the story attached to it is true.
Because your reach multiplies whatever you're carrying. Including the parts you never checked.
I know, because I taught learning styles for years to people who trusted me.
The window
I'm not asking you to become cynical. Cynicism is just credulity with a different default setting, and it's equally lazy.
I'm asking something smaller and more useful.
Keep what works. Get curious about why it works. And notice the difference between "this helps me" and "here's the mechanism," because those are two different claims and only one of them needs evidence before you repeat it.
So here's what I'm carrying out of this week, and I'll hand it over the same way it came to me.
What's one thing you teach... that you've never actually checked?
You don't have to answer that today. But I'd sit with it.
Definitions
Neuromyth. A belief about how the brain works that sounds scientific, spreads widely, and turns out not to be true.
Meshing hypothesis. The specific testable claim inside learning styles theory: that people learn better when the teaching method matches their preferred style.
Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). A model of communication and personal change developed in the 1970s by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, built on the idea that people process experience through a preferred sensory channel that can be identified and matched.
Cognitive reappraisal. Deliberately generating a different interpretation of a situation in order to change its emotional impact. A core mechanism in cognitive behavioural therapy, with substantial research support.
Systematic review. A study that searches the literature comprehensively using a defined method, then assesses every study that meets the criteria. Designed to remove the cherry-picking that happens when people cite only what supports them.
Randomized controlled trial (RCT). A study where participants are randomly assigned to receive an intervention or not, so differences in outcome can be attributed to the intervention rather than to who chose it.
Join us at the next Live Brand Alignment Hot Seat - Words and Images, One Voice.
Sources
Primary research
Wiseman, R., Watt, C., ten Brinke, L., Porter, S., Couper, S.-L., & Rankin, C. (2012). The Eyes Don't Have It: Lie Detection and Neuro-Linguistic Programming. PLoS ONE, 7(7), e40259.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0040259
Witkowski, T. (2010). Thirty-Five Years of Research on Neuro-Linguistic Programming. NLP Research Data Base. State of the Art or Pseudoscientific Decoration? Polish Psychological Bulletin, 41(2), 58–66.
Sturt, J., Ali, S., Robertson, W., Metcalfe, D., Grove, A., Bourne, C., & Bridle, C. (2012). Neurolinguistic programming: a systematic review of the effects on health outcomes. British Journal of General Practice, 62(604), e757–e764. Source of the technique-to-established-practice mapping.
https://bjgp.org/content/62/604/e757
Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9(3), 105–119.
Dekker, S., Lee, N. C., Howard-Jones, P., & Jolles, J. (2012). Neuromyths in Education: Prevalence and Predictors of Misconceptions among Teachers. Frontiers in Psychology, 3, 429.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00429/full
Pennebaker, J. W., & Chung, C. K. Expressive Writing, Emotional Upheavals, and Health. Book chapter. Contains the statement that no studies have compared ways of writing on health outcomes.
https://c3po.media.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/2016/01/PennebakerChung_FriedmanChapter.pdf
Worth knowing about
Sturt and colleagues state that their conclusion reflects the limited quantity and quality of NLP research rather than robust evidence of no effect. That is a real distinction. The eye-movement and representational-system claims were tested and failed. Overall clinical efficacy is more under-researched than disproven.
There is also a competing meta-analysis conducted by NLP practitioners, covering 12 studies and reporting a moderate positive effect. It included non-peer-reviewed work and was carried out by people with a stake in the outcome. Worth knowing it exists.
A meta-analysis on cognitive reappraisal in digital mental health interventions, for the evidence behind reframing:
