Using Polya Patterns in your Suggestions

For many years I’ve worked on the principle that something doesn’t have to be true, it just has to be plausible – something I think I got from some research from Xerox into how we go about making buying decisions. I’ve found this to be very useful in therapy; the world we live in, and the life we live, is all based on our perceptions. Successful therapy doesn’t depend on us finding the truth about a person’s problem (if there is such a thing), just finding a plausible explanation that satisfies that person will enable them to make a positive change. I’ve been reading a lot about the psychology of decision making – how we make choices – because it strikes me that if we can understand how the brain becomes convinced of something, and work within that channel, then our interventions will become more potent. In my reading I’ve found that neuroscience has determined that the importance of logic tends to be overstated – we’re not logical creatures after all, we make a lot of our decisions intuitively. What researchers such as Gerd Gigerenzer are elucidating are the rules the unconscious uses to arrive at intuitions that can often out-perform careful cogitation – something that Malcolm Gladwell brilliantly explores in his book, Blink.

These rules and how we can use them in therapy are going to be the subject of a later blog; what I’m planning to describe today seem to me to be strongly related and were first identified half a century ago.

George Polya was a famous mathematician who published a book called Patterns of Plausible Inference in 1954. In it he looked at what strategies we use to come to conclusions about things we have incomplete information about (which is most things, particularly in a communications sense). Polya Patterns, as they came to be called, focus on how we give things credibility by inferring plausibility to a point of view, argument or belief.

Polya made the point that in most cases we can’t know the truth about something because we don’t have the time to gain enough information to be certain, so we need a mental procedure to help us reliably weigh the plausibility of something presented to us. These procedures, or patterns, are mainly held unconsciously and run out of our awareness.

Polya Patterns have been used within NLP, particularly by Richard Bandler, as a means of creating change. By understanding the way the brain infers meaning from incomplete information I think they can be a useful guide in the creation of hypnotic suggestions. If we understand the rules by which the brain decides that something it hears is plausible, and our suggestions follow those rules, then the influence of those suggestions should be very powerful.

Patterns of Plausible inference

There are six Polya Patterns:
1. Meta Pattern: Probability
2. Verification of a consequence
3. Contingency
4. Inference from analogy
5. Disprove the Converse
6. Comparison with Random

1. Meta Pattern: Probability.
This is concerned with how something performed in the past guides our perception about the likelihood of it performing that way again:

a) The more something happens, the more we believe it will happen again.
We can utilise this pattern in our suggestions in the following way: (those of you familiar with Wordweaving will be able to spot the trance phenomena and language patterns within the suggestion. You’ll also be aware that these are only examples of how the rules of plausible inferences can be incorporated into your suggestions, they’re not intended to be definitive.)
“And it doesn’t matter how soon you begin to realise how much more often these positive things are happening in your life…so that…as the days go by…you might even begin to find yourself expecting that they will again…because it tends to be the way doesn’t it…the more good things are happening now the more they just become part of the fabric of your life…”

b) If something which is not very probable occurs, it tends to validate the cause-effect belief which predicted it.
We can utilise this pattern in our suggestions in the following way:

“And the work we do together is all about change…you changing you…and the way you experience the world around you…and often it’s the case that you never quite know what change you’ve achieved in a session that moves your life forward…until you notice that it has…moved forward in ways you might not expect…often small ways that build up to something greater…sometimes something more surprising…something that once might have seemed improbable to you suddenly happens to let you know this is really working…you are changing….”

2. Verification of a consequence.
If a particular consequence (C) is implied by a particular belief (B) – and that consequence occurs, then it makes the belief more plausible. The fewer alternative causes, the stronger the inference.

a) Successive verification of several consequences
We can utilise this pattern in our suggestions in the following way:

“…change is often like dropping a pebble in a pond…the ripples begin to spread in all directions…throughout your life…things begin to happen that are taking you towards where you want to go…what you came here for…and it might not initially occur to you to connect them together..because they might appear in different area of your life… but perhaps…at night…before sleep…as you look back over recent days…you might begin to see more and more clearly…how these different things are connected to the pebble you drop into your mind in these sessions…and the more you see these things connected to your improvement the more you might find yourself believing in you…”

b) Verification of an improbable consequence (extreme examples)
We can utilise this pattern in our suggestions in the following way:

“…and we all need something different to convince us…that things are changing…some people might need something small..some might need something bigger…but what tends to be true is that we’ll all be convinced by something…big enough..surprising enough…to let us know that this is real….and I can’t tell you what it will be…in fact it would be wrong for me to impose on you what I think will cause you that moment of surprise or even amazement…you’ll know it when it happens…unexpectedly…or you see it coming…it doesn’t matter…if it’s here now…or later…something that lets you know X….”
If B implies C and C is true then B is more credible

3. Contingency.
If a belief (B) presupposes (or requires as a precondition) some event or phenomenon, and this contingent event is verified, then it makes the belief more plausible.
We can utilise this pattern in our suggestions in the following way:

“…and none of us can predict what is going to happen to us…we have no control over what life throws at us…but…as Viktor Fankl once said…the last freedom we have is to choose the meaning of our circumstances…so it’s not what happens to us that matters…but what we make of it…and this is so important..because some people come to therapy thinking it will make life easier…but that’s like taking sailing lessons hoping the sea will stay calm..instead what it does is make it easier to maintain your course whatever life throws at you…so when next you face a challenge…as you will…whether it’s at the time or afterwards you realise how much better you were at dealing with it…making it what you needed it to be to get past it…then it just goes to show how having control over you…you control your response to life so much more positively…”
If B presupposes C and C is true then B is more credible

4. Inference from analogy.
A belief (B) is more plausible if an analogous conjecture (A) is proven true. If not true, then credible still increases the plausibility.
We can utilise this pattern in our suggestions in the following way:

“…new things can be challenging…and when you first face the prospect of doing something new it’s natural to feel the way you do…like when you were learning to ride a bike…how many times you needed to try before that wonderful moment of freedom and achievement…and it’s often in moments of struggle that we learn important things about ourselves that make us even stronger…so when you think about overcoming the challenge of riding… and this next challenge….we might both wonder what it’ll be that you’ll learn by doing it that makes you even more of what you want to be…”
If B is analogous to A and A is true then B is more credible.

5. Disprove the Converse.
The plausibility of a belief (B) increases if a rival belief (C) is disproved.
We can utilise this pattern in our suggestions in the following way:

“…and some people would say that change is difficult…even impossible…that we are who we are and that’s that…we’re stuck with our limitations…and you’ll see those people around you every day…and it would be so easy to be one of them…except…except…that when you look back over your life…remembering who you were when you were younger…what you believed…what you could do…you might begin to realise that change isn’t difficult at all…it’s inevitable…you might remember things you once believed were true that make you smile now you think of them…some beliefs dissolve in a moment of insight…like Santa…some things you found difficult are now done without thought…like walking..riding a bike…so as you find yourself continuing to change…as we do…you might begin to realise how much enjoyment there is in being in control of the direction you want this change to take you…where you want to go…”

6. Comparison with Random.
If a belief can be shown to predict a particular result with better than random accuracy then it is more credible.
We can utilise this pattern in our suggestions in the following way:

“…so if we were to ask your unconscious to begin to notice around you those differences that mean you’re changing in the way you want to…you might wonder how much more often you notice them before you realise it’s true…you are moving towards this new you…and it doesn’t have to happen immediately…it might take a while before you realise that you’ve changed too much to remember easily the way you used to be…too many good things happening too often for it to be anything other than…you’re changing…”

As with many things, when the Polya Patterns are described they become something quite simple, and even obvious. But then, if our unconscious is using them all the time they would appear both obvious and familiar. The power of them lies in the fact that until they are shown to us we’re was unaware of their presence in our thinking – so utilising them in our suggestions is another example of us working within the software of the brain – using the brain’s processes on itself to help make things run more smoothly. I hope you find them useful, I think I’m going to have a lot more to say about them, and other rules our brains use to create beliefs, in the next few months.