REASONING BIASES AND PSY RHETORIC IN FLORAL ALTERNATIVE THERAPY

Abstract

In recent decades, the popularity of alternative therapies like Bach flower remedies has increased significantly. Since any effects of Bach flower remedies are not superior to those achieved by placebo treatment, the use of different rhetorical strategies and persuasion techniques seems to be decisive. The present qualitative study sought to describe the biases that support the subjective justification of floral therapy. We used an open and flexible coding of the statements made by participants on a floral therapist’s blog. As a result, strategies related to personalization and discursive self-reference, idiographic knowledge, psychologization of therapy and fundamental attribution error, mystifying essentialization, and animistic thinking were identified. Other strategies included the use of paratherapeutic language and the pseudo-scientific lexicon, the relativization of therapeutic options, therapeutic holism, as well as the rationalization of hope, the construction of explanatory stories and retrospective confirmation. Finally, we discuss the possibility that the effectiveness of these strategies is based on an excessive psychologism (or psi rhetoric), in an environment that favors post-truth.