Doctrines
Law of Attraction
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Origin from 1906
The claim that a person's thoughts and feelings exert a causal pull on real world outcomes, so that sustained focus on a desired result makes that result more likely to occur. The phrase and the underlying idea trace to the New Thought movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, popularized in works such as William Walker Atkinson's Thought Vibration, or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World (1906) and Wallace Wattles's The Science of Getting Rich (1910), and reached its widest modern audience through Rhonda Byrne's The Secret (2006). Physicists and psychologists who have examined its popular presentations have rejected its invocations of quantum mechanics as a proposed mechanism and found no support for thought alone reliably producing material outcomes.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period Historical OriginPopularized within New Thought in the early twentieth century, notably by William Walker Atkinson's 1906 Thought Vibration, or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World and Wallace Wattles's 1910 The Science of Getting Rich; carried to a mass twenty-first century audience by Rhonda Byrne's The Secret (2006). 1 Position Profile
Principal ProponentWilliam Walker Atkinson and Wallace Wattles in classical New Thought; Rhonda Byrne in its modern mass-market form 1 Status
Status Within the TraditionSourced to the subject's own accountGenuinely disputed within this tradition 2 Status Within the TraditionSourced to the subject's own accountStandard within the tradition, but disputed in the contemporary academic philosophy of religion 2 Status TodayWidely practiced today across New Thought churches, the broader self-help market and New Age spirituality 1 The Claim
The ClaimSourced to the subject's own accountThat focused thought and feeling exert a causal influence on real world outcomes, so that wanting something and believing in it strongly enough increases the likelihood of receiving it. 2 Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern UseSourced to the subject's own accountCritics including Barbara Ehrenreich have argued that presenting illness or hardship as the result of insufficiently positive thought shifts responsibility for circumstances with outside causes onto the person experiencing them, a use clinicians have specifically criticized when applied to conditions such as cancer. 2 Scholarship and Forensics
Scholarly VerdictSourced to the subject's own accountPhysicists including Lisa Randall and psychologists including Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons have rejected the popular claim that quantum mechanics provides a mechanism by which thought affects matter, and no controlled evidence supports thought alone reliably producing material outcomes. 2 Learn More
A New Thought Idea in Modern Packaging
The law of attraction holds that a person's thoughts and feelings exert a direct causal pull on real world outcomes, so that sustained, focused attention on a desired result is claimed to make that result measurably more likely to actually occur. The idea did not originate with any of its recent popularizers. It traces to the New Thought movement, a mind healing current with religious and metaphysical roots that took shape in the United States across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawing on influences that ranged from Platonism and Swedenborgian thought to Hegelian philosophy and elements of Hinduism and American Transcendentalism, and holding generally that incorrect thinking causes sin, illness and disorder while correct, constructive thinking carries genuine creative power. The specific phrase and doctrine reached an early wide readership through William Walker Atkinson's 1906 book Thought Vibration, or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World and through Wallace Wattles's 1910 The Science of Getting Rich, and it reached by far its widest modern audience nearly a century later through Rhonda Byrne's 2006 book and film The Secret, which repackaged the same core New Thought claim for a mass contemporary market.
What the Physicists and Psychologists Found
Popular presentations of the law of attraction, The Secret prominent among them, routinely invoke quantum physics as the mechanism supposedly underlying the claim, arguing that focused thought sends out some form of vibration that the physical universe then somehow detects and responds to by rearranging events in the thinker's favor. Physicists who have examined that specific claim have rejected it as a serious misappropriation of quantum mechanics, a field of physics that describes the behavior of subatomic particles and offers no established mechanism by which ordinary human thought could act directly on external physical outcomes at a distance, and commentary in publications such as Skeptical Inquirer has specifically criticized the argument for lacking any real basis in physical science despite its confident scientific language. Psychologists who have studied the popular claim on its own more modest terms have similarly found no reliable support for the idea that thought alone reliably produces material outcomes in the world, as opposed to the more limited and genuinely supported finding that a person's expectations can shape their own attention, effort and behavior in ways that indirectly affect what they achieve. The gap between the confident claim and the actual supporting evidence is the central criticism made against it.
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