The law of attraction

What it is

The claim that thoughts attract corresponding circumstances — that focusing on wealth, health or love causes them to arrive, and that focusing on their absence causes the absence to persist. "Like attracts like", applied to mental states and material outcomes.

The strong version, which is the one usually sold, holds that this is a law operating with the reliability of gravity, that it is always in effect, and that everything in a person's life was attracted by them.

Where it came from

Not from anywhere ancient. The lineage is short, documented, and American.

New Thought in the 1880s established the framework: Phineas Quimby's mental healing, Prentice Mulford, Emma Curtis Hopkins, and the churches that grew from them — Unity, Religious Science, Divine Science.

Thomas Troward, Wallace Wattles (The Science of Getting Rich, 1910) and William Walker Atkinson — whose Thought Vibration, or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World was published in 1906 — gave it the name and the mechanism.

Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich (1937) carried it into business culture, where it has never left. Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) gave it a Christian form. Esther and Jerry Hicks, channelling an entity called Abraham from the 1980s, supplied the modern vocabulary of vibration and alignment.

Rhonda Byrne's The Secret (2006) — book and film — sold in the tens of millions and made the strong version globally famous. Its framing is that this is knowledge deliberately suppressed by churches and governments for centuries. That framing is marketing, and the actual sources are the Americans listed above, some of whom Byrne credits.

How it is used

Through visualisation, affirmation, gratitude practice, "acting as if", and vigilance against negative thought. The practical techniques are covered under manifestation practices.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the mechanism as stated has no support. The claim that mental states cause distant physical events by attraction is not supported by evidence, has no proposed mechanism compatible with physics, and has not been demonstrated in any controlled test. The frequent appeal to quantum mechanics — observation collapsing wave functions, vibration, frequency — is not what those terms mean, and physicists have said so repeatedly and without effect.

We can say some of the effects it points at are real, for other reasons. Attention shapes what you notice, so a person focused on opportunities finds more of them. Expectancy affects performance and persistence. Confidence changes how others respond. Clarity about a goal makes action toward it more likely. Gratitude practice has modest but genuine evidence for wellbeing. None of this is attraction. It is attention, motivation and behaviour, and the ordinary explanation accounts for the experiences that people cite as proof.

We can say the confirmation-bias structure is the reason it survives. Successes confirm it. Failures are attributed to insufficient belief, hidden resistance, unconscious negativity, or the universe having a better plan. A claim that cannot fail cannot be tested, and this one has been built so that it cannot fail.

And we can say the harm is not abstract, and it is the reason this article exists.

The strong version entails that people attract their circumstances. Applied honestly, it means cancer patients attracted their cancer, that the bereaved attracted their loss, that people in poverty attracted it, and that abused children attracted abuse. The Secret itself contains statements to this effect about illness and about disasters. Barbara Ehrenreich, writing after her own breast cancer diagnosis in Smile or Die (2009), documented what this does inside cancer support culture: patients policing their own emotions, afraid that fear or anger would make the disease worse, and made to feel responsible for a recurrence.

The specific documented harms:

• Delayed or refused medical treatment, where a person believes positive thinking will do the work. This is the same territory as medical harm, and people have died of it.
• Victim-blaming as doctrine — a theology in which the poor, the ill and the assaulted are the authors of their situation.
• Suppression of legitimate negative emotion, which is spiritual bypassing with a mechanism attached, and which grief researchers regard as actively harmful.
• Financial loss, in courses and coaching sold on the promise.

Nothing here is medical advice, and no decision about treatment should be made on the basis of any belief about attraction. Anyone facing a serious diagnosis should be talking to their clinicians.

We cannot say that setting an intention, keeping a clear goal in mind, or practising gratitude is harmful — those are ordinary, and often useful. What we can say is that the law of attraction as formulated is a hundred and twenty years old, is not supported, cannot be tested, and in its strong form tells suffering people that they did it to themselves.

Further reading

• Barbara Ehrenreich, Smile or Die (US title Bright-Sided, 2009).
• Mitch Horowitz, One Simple Idea (2014) — a sympathetic historian of New Thought.
• William Walker Atkinson, Thought Vibration (1906), for the actual original.