Law of Attraction

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.

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.