New Thought
The Law of Attraction: Where It Came From, What It Claims, and Its Critics
Few spiritual ideas have traveled as far as the law of attraction. In its simplest popular form, it says that your thoughts draw matching experiences into your life: think about abundance and abundance comes, dwell on lack and lack follows. Millions of people have read about it, tried it, and argued about it. Some say it changed their lives. Others say it is harmful nonsense. Both reactions are easier to understand once you know where the idea came from, what it actually claims, and where the evidence stands. This article separates those three things as carefully as it can.
Roots in New Thought
The law of attraction grew out of New Thought, a loose American movement of the nineteenth century built around the belief that mind is the primary reality and that right thinking can heal the body and improve one's life. An early figure often linked to the movement is Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, a New England mental healer who worked in the mid 1800s and taught that much illness was rooted in mistaken beliefs. His students and successors spread versions of these ideas, and by the end of the century New Thought had its own churches, magazines, and lecture circuits.
Within this world, writers began describing thought as a kind of force. Prentice Mulford, an American writer, published essays with the title Thoughts Are Things in the late 1880s, arguing that thoughts have real effects beyond the mind. In 1906 William Walker Atkinson published Thought Vibration, or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World, which put the phrase front and center and described thought as a vibration that draws similar vibrations to itself. A few years later, in 1910, Wallace D. Wattles published The Science of Getting Rich, which applied similar reasoning directly to money.
These books were written in confident, scientific sounding language. Words like vibration, magnetism and law were borrowed from physics, which in that era was making genuinely astonishing discoveries about invisible forces. It is easy to see why the comparison felt natural to readers at the time. It is also important to note that the borrowing was metaphorical. None of these writers ran experiments showing that thoughts emit vibrations that attract events.
From Self-Help Classic to The Secret
Through the twentieth century, the core idea lived on in self-help writing. Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich, published in 1937, did not lean on the phrase "law of attraction" as heavily, but it carried the same theme: a burning desire, held firmly in mind, sets in motion the forces that bring it about. Later authors in the positive thinking tradition kept the idea in circulation.
The biggest modern revival came in 2006 with The Secret, a film and companion book produced by Rhonda Byrne. It presented the law of attraction as a hidden truth known to great figures through history and offered a simple formula, usually summarized as ask, believe, receive. The film and book reached a huge audience, helped by television exposure, and they shaped how most people today understand the term. The Secret also drew heavy criticism, which is discussed below.
What the Idea Actually Claims
It helps to distinguish between a strong version and a weak version of the law of attraction, because people defending it and people attacking it often mean different things.
- The strong version says that thoughts have a direct, physical or metaphysical power to draw events, objects, money and people toward you. On this view, the universe responds to your mental state as a matter of law, much like gravity.
- The weak version says that your thoughts shape your attention, your mood, your choices and how others respond to you, and that over time this changes your results. On this view, there is no mysterious force, just ordinary psychology working consistently.
The weak version is plausible and fits a good deal of what psychologists know about expectation, motivation and behavior. The strong version is a metaphysical belief. It may be meaningful to people who hold it, but it is not something that has been shown to be true, and it is not a law in the scientific sense.
What Psychology Says
There are well studied effects that overlap with the weak version. The self-fulfilling prophecy, a term coined by sociologist Robert K. Merton, describes how a belief can lead to behavior that makes the belief come true. Expectations influence how hard people try and how they interpret ambiguous situations. People who notice opportunities are more likely to act on them, and attention is selective: when you are thinking about something, you are more likely to spot it.
At the same time, research also complicates the popular message. Psychologist Gabriele Oettingen has spent many years studying positive fantasies about the future. Her work suggests that simply imagining a desired outcome can, in some situations, reduce the effort people put into reaching it, perhaps because the fantasy feels a little like having already arrived. She developed an approach called mental contrasting, in which people picture the outcome they want and then picture the obstacles in the way, and her studies report that this combination tends to support action better than positive fantasy alone.
A 1999 study by Lien Pham and Shelley Taylor offers a related finding. Students preparing for an exam who were asked to visualize the process of studying did better than students who were asked to visualize the outcome of getting a high grade. The lesson is not that thinking positively is useless. It is that the kind of thinking matters, and that picturing steps tends to help more than picturing rewards.
The Critics
Criticism of the law of attraction comes from several directions.
Scientists and skeptics object to the strong version on the grounds that there is no known mechanism and no reliable evidence. Borrowed terms like vibration and frequency do not refer to anything that can be measured in the way the teaching implies.
Many critics also point to confirmation bias. People who believe in the law remember the times they thought of something and it appeared, and forget the much larger number of times nothing happened. Stories of success get told and retold, while quiet failures do not.
The sharpest moral criticism is about blame. If your thoughts attract your circumstances, then illness, poverty or misfortune can seem to be your own fault. Writer Barbara Ehrenreich made a version of this case in her 2009 book Bright-Sided, arguing that relentless positive thinking can discourage people from facing real problems and can leave the suffering feeling guilty for their suffering. Defenders reply that the teaching is meant to empower, not to blame, but the risk is real enough that thoughtful teachers address it directly.
The idea did not come from a single book. Atkinson, the author of Thought Vibration, is also widely credited with The Kybalion, where the Principle of Vibration plays a central role, so the two strands of Hermetic and New Thought teaching met in the same writer. Readers who want the practical side without the promises often find more value in the old concentration exercises, which ask for steady attention rather than belief.
A Practical Takeaway
The law of attraction is best understood as a piece of history and a belief system, not as a finding. Its useful core, that what you focus on shapes what you notice and do, is supported by ordinary psychology. Its strong claims are not. If you want to use the idea, keep the useful part: be clear about what you want, then picture the steps and obstacles, not just the reward. Act on it. And when hardship comes, do not treat it as proof that you thought the wrong thoughts.
Sources and further reading
- Law of attraction (New Thought) (Wikipedia)
- Prentice Mulford (Wikipedia)
- The Secret (Byrne book) (Wikipedia)