The law of attraction

Stating the claim precisely

Most writing about the law of attraction is either devotional or dismissive, and both tend to skip the step of saying exactly what is being asserted. It is worth doing carefully, because the strong version and the weak version deserve different responses.

The strong version is a claim about physics. Thoughts have a frequency, the universe responds to that frequency, and circumstances of a matching quality are drawn toward you as a consequence. Like attracts like, in a literal rather than metaphorical sense. This is the version in the best known books and the version that gives the idea its name, since a law in that framing means something on the order of gravitation.

The weak version is a claim about psychology. What you dwell on shapes what you notice, what you notice shapes what you pursue, and what you pursue shapes what happens. Nobody serious disputes the weak version, and it is also not the law of attraction. It is attention, and it has been studied under that name for a century.

Almost every defence of the idea works by stating the strong version and retreating to the weak one when challenged. That move is worth noticing, because the strong version is what people are actually buying and the weak version is what is being defended.

Where it came from

The idea is older than most people assume and its lineage explains a lot about its shape. It emerged from the New Thought movement in nineteenth century America, a loose religious and philosophical current holding that mind is primary and that illness and poverty are consequences of wrong thinking. Prentice Mulford and Thomas Troward were writing in these terms in the 1880s and 1890s. Wallace Wattles published The Science of Getting Rich in 1910, which supplied both the vocabulary and the certainty.

Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich carried it into the mainstream in 1937, wrapped in the language of industrial success. Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking did the same for a postwar audience in 1952. The version most people encountered arrived in 2006, when Rhonda Byrne's film and book The Secret compressed the whole lineage into a single memorable phrase and sold in the tens of millions.

Two things follow from that history. The first is that the idea has always been entangled with selling, from Wattles to Hill to The Secret, and the commercial incentive has shaped the claim rather than the other way around. The second is that it has always carried an explanation for failure built into it, which is the part worth examining most closely.

What the evidence actually says

There is no body of research supporting the strong claim, and there is no mechanism proposed for it that survives contact with physics. That is not a controversial position and it is not worth labouring. What is more interesting is that several studies bear directly on the practices the idea recommends, and the findings are not neutral. In places they point the other way.

Positive fantasy predicts worse outcomes, not better

This is the finding that ought to be famous and is not. Kappes and Oettingen ran a series of studies on positively fantasising about an idealised future and found it lowered energy, measured physiologically, and predicted lower achievement over periods from a fortnight to two years. In a job-hunting sample, students who fantasised more about their ideal position sent fewer applications and received fewer offers. In a weight-loss sample, participants who fantasised more lost less. Dwelling pleasurably on the outcome appears to let the mind take partial credit for it, which drains the energy that would have gone into pursuit.

That is close to a direct test of the core instruction. Feel as though you already have it is the central practice of the law of attraction, and the research on doing exactly that finds it reduces effort.

Affirmations can leave some people worse off

Wood, Perunovic and Lee tested repeating positive self-statements and found that people with low self-esteem, the group most likely to be reaching for them, felt worse afterwards than a control group who did nothing. The proposed reason is that a statement far outside what you currently believe gets rejected, and the rejection is the part that stays with you. The self-affirmation literature that does show benefits, reviewed by Cohen and Sherman, works differently, because it involves writing about a value you already hold rather than asserting a fact you do not believe.

Contrasting the wish with the obstacle beats either alone

Oettingen's work on mental contrasting is the constructive half. Holding the desired future and the present obstacle together, rather than either separately, produced stronger commitment to feasible goals and faster disengagement from infeasible ones. Fantasy alone produced commitment to everything, which is indistinguishable from commitment to nothing. The instruction to remove all doubt is therefore not neutral advice. It removes the component that makes the practice work.

The part that does damage

A framework that explains success by right thinking necessarily explains failure by wrong thinking. That is not an unfortunate side effect of the law of attraction, it is the same sentence read backwards, and it is the reason this page is careful rather than dismissive.

Applied to an ordinary setback it produces a mild version of the problem, since you conclude you did not want it enough and try again. Applied to illness, redundancy, bereavement or poverty it produces something worse. A person told that circumstances follow thought has been handed an account in which their diagnosis or their debt reflects a defect in their inner life. The evidence for that account is zero and the cost of believing it lands hardest on the people least able to absorb it.

It also makes the framework unfalsifiable, which is a strong indication that it is not doing the work it claims. If it worked, the method is validated. If it did not, you had residual doubt. There is no result that counts against it, and a claim that cannot fail is a claim that predicts nothing.

Why it spread anyway

Dismissing something that has persuaded tens of millions of people as simple credulity is lazy, and it also misses the mechanism. There are at least four decent reasons this idea travels.

• It sometimes appears to work, for real reasons. Someone who writes down a specific goal, looks at it daily and starts saying yes to things does get different outcomes. The practice was effective and the explanation attached to it was wrong, which is an easy pair to confuse.
• Survivorship is loud. The people it worked for write books. The people it did not work for conclude they did it wrong and stay quiet, which is exactly what the framework instructs them to conclude.
• It offers control. Most of what determines a life is outside anyone's hands, and that is genuinely hard to sit with. A framework promising that your inner state governs your outer circumstances is a substantial comfort, and comfort spreads.
• The alternative is unsatisfying. Be specific, plan for the obstacle, act on Tuesday and write down what happened is correct and completely unmemorable. It does not sell films.

The twelve universal laws, and why the number keeps changing

Search for this topic and you will quickly meet the twelve universal laws, of which attraction is presented as one. It is worth knowing what these are, partly because they come up constantly and partly because their history says something useful about the whole framework.

The usual list runs through divine oneness, vibration, action, correspondence, cause and effect, compensation, attraction, perpetual transmutation of energy, relativity, polarity, rhythm and gender. The framing is that attraction cannot work alone and needs the other eleven to function, which conveniently explains why it did not work for you.

The lineage is not what it is usually said to be. These are generally traced to The Kybalion, published anonymously in 1908 by three people writing as the Three Initiates and presented as ancient Hermetic wisdom from Egypt. It is a work of the early twentieth century rather than antiquity, and it lists seven principles rather than twelve. The number grew later, through the self-help literature, and different sources still give different lists. A set of natural laws whose membership changes depending on who is counting is not operating as a description of the world.

Two of them are worth a second look regardless of provenance. The law of action says that belief without effort produces nothing, which is correct and is the part most commonly left out of the popular version. The law of cause and effect is a plain statement that actions have consequences. Both are useful, both survive removing the mystical framing entirely, and both point at the same conclusion as the research does, which is that the practice matters and the metaphysics does not.

What is worth keeping

The practices survive the claim. If you have been running a law of attraction routine, most of it can stay, with three specific changes.

Run all six of those and you have a practice with real evidence behind it, no supernatural claim attached, and nothing that blames you when circumstances outside your control do what they were going to do anyway. The full routine is in a grounded daily practice, and the planning half is in why goals fail in week three.

So is it real

As a law, no. There is no force, no frequency and no mechanism, and the idea does not make predictions that could fail, which is the ordinary test.

As a description of why some people who practise it get results, partly, and by accident. The specificity is real, the daily contact with a goal is real, and the increased willingness to act on an opportunity is real. Those three would produce the same outcomes under any name, and they do.

The reasonable position is neither devotion nor contempt. Take the practices, drop the physics, and add the obstacle back in. What remains is smaller than what was promised and considerably more likely to change your year.