Trade unions are investing tens of millions of pseudoscience – Swedish Radio

The union Union has invested tens of million in staff development based on pseudoscience. Critical researchers are advised to take the courses.

It is about the so-called communicology, which co-founder is described as a doctrine which identified the keys to success in communications, but as opposed to an independent peer review.

Among other things, Heads of the Union has been crawling around on the floor on all fours in the belief that it would improve their decision-making.

– I am convinced that I feel good as a person and is great as a human being in balance, this affects my decision making for the better. How to achieve it, there are several methods.

How to defend Hanna Brandt-Gonzales, Secretary of the Union, the Heads crawling on the floor – an exercise which, according communicology login lead to better contact between brain parts, and thus that it would strengthen the decision-making. But it and other claims that are made about how the brain works is dismissed by leading brain scientists as nonsense and myths.

The Union’s efforts communicology down all other personnel in the shade and was estimated in 2010 to cost at least SEK 23 million. Today most of the union’s 900 employees had to attend courses in communicology and some 50 managers also received training to so-called certified communicology lodges.

But critical employees as the science radio spoken to compare communicology login with the Church of Scientology, calling education playhouse and a waste of time.

– It sounds horrible, what you describe has nothing to do with the Union’s development work to do, says Permanent Secretary Hanna Brandt Gonzales.

In addition to crawling on floor will communicology lodges with claims of other specific movements gives both better health and make the practitioners more intelligent. But an independent review of how they arrived at it they do not want to set up. Critical researchers are instead the Council to join their classes.

Mattias Lundberg is researcher in psychology at Umeå University.

– It should be clear that it is quite easy to sell stuff, not least as in this case where it expresses that it would be a research or science based product actually sells. As it is today, one can say one thing without ever having tried it, so we do not know what communicology really is, says Mattias Lundberg.

Marcus Hansson
vet@sverigesradio.se

Vetandets world sends today 12:10 The first part of the series Psykobabblarna – how pseudoscience spread in Sweden.