concrete experimental results ... finding true causal models by looking at what a majority of the scientists in a given field use

Then the widespread use of NLP-based approaches in marketing and pickup -- both fields that demand actual performance in motivating the behavior of strangers -- should be suggestive of what sort of model you should be looking at when you want to study applied motivational psychology. It is definitely "less wrong" than the hideously naive theories of mind in use in current cog-psych literature, or for that matter, most pop-psych literature -- they sadly reflect each other to a large extent.

Truly modern ideas in cog psych and neuro psych (like the "somatic marker hypothesis") are only now (in the 21st century) catching up to things that were in NLP Volume I almost 30 years ago. See e.g.: this recent keynote cog psych paper compared to what the earliest NLP books have to say about the physiology of emotional states. Mainstream psychology has barely started to catch up, while NLP hasn't stayed still.

Of course, depending on your definitions of "true" and "experimental", you may have to wait another 30 years or so for mainstream psych research to catch up with models that actually work.