Does the law of attraction work? What research says about manifesting, affirmations and visualization

The “law of attraction” is the belief that thoughts draw reality to us. It was popularised by the 2006 book The Secret, which claimed that anyone who thinks positively, pictures what they want and talks to themselves accordingly can draw anything into their life through a cosmic “law of attraction”. Researchers call this belief “manifesting” and define it as the belief that you can attract success through positive self-talk, visualization and symbolic actions such as acting as if something is already true (Dixon et al., 2025).

Its roots lie in the New Thought movement in late-19th-century America, which spread the idea that people could cure illness through positive mental images and self-talk; believers explain that symbolic actions send out the “energy” or “vibration” of wealth, which comes back to them (Dixon et al., 2025). Critics note that the movement has since grown into a large self-help industry selling books and seminars (Andrade, 2019).

How many people believe it? In one US online survey, 35% of 306 participants held some belief in manifesting, and across three studies (1,023 people), over a third did (Dixon et al., 2025). Despite the word “law”, though, it is a belief, not a scientific law established by experiments. This guide covers the research on positive fantasies, visualization and affirmations, why the idea still feels true, and what has actually helped people reach goals.

Research distinguishes two ways of thinking about the future: expectations, judging that a desired future is likely, and fantasies, enjoying thoughts and images of a desired future. In four studies that followed graduates looking for a job, students with a crush on someone, undergraduates facing an exam and patients having hip-replacement surgery for weeks or months (up to 2 years), positive expectations predicted high effort and good performance, but positive fantasies predicted the reverse (Oettingen & Mayer, 2002).

In four experiments described by the same research group, people asked to fantasize positively about an idealized future showed lower energy and put in less effort than people asked to question their fantasies, to fantasize negatively or to think factually. Energy was measured both by how people felt and by bodily markers such as systolic blood pressure (Kappes & Oettingen, 2011, as cited in Oettingen & Schwörer, 2013). Positive fantasies went with fewer depressive symptoms at the time but predicted more depressive symptoms up to 7 months later (Oettingen et al., 2016). If low mood persists, see depression: what helps.

In an experiment in which first-year students spent 5 to 7 days before a midterm exam picturing either a good grade (the outcome), the way they would study (the process), or both, picturing the process led to more studying and better grades, through more planning and less anxiety (Pham & Taylor, 1999). The same researchers concluded that picturing a goal already achieved, as self-help books recommend, did not help (Taylor et al., 1998).

Picturing things is not always useless. Mental imagery that rehearses health behaviours such as exercise or eating changed behaviour by a small amount in a meta-analysis of 26 studies (Conroy & Hagger, 2018). Imagery training in sport also improved performance and motivation, and imagery together with physical practice worked better than physical practice alone (Simonsmeier et al., 2021). But this is rehearsing in your mind what you will do, not attracting an outcome.

Affirmations, positive statements repeated to yourself such as “I’m a lovable person”, are widely used and believed to work, but their effectiveness had not been demonstrated. In a 2009 study, participants with low self-esteem who repeated “I’m a lovable person” felt worse than those who did not repeat it, while those with high self-esteem felt better, but only to a limited degree (Wood et al., 2009).

However, two studies in 2020 that repeated the same method (about 225 and 237 people) found no difference in mood or self-esteem between people who used affirmations and people who did not, and the backfiring in people with low self-esteem did not appear again (Flynn & Bordieri, 2020). One failed replication does not fully overturn the original result, but the effect of affirmations is uncertain in either direction. Writing balanced statements that are close to the facts, rather than covering things over with forced positive words, is covered in how to build self-esteem.

What researchers call “self-affirmation” is different from affirmations: it is a short exercise of writing about values that matter to you (Cohen & Sherman, 2014). It appears to reduce defensive resistance to threatening health information, and in a meta-analysis of 144 experiments in which people reflected on their values, it had small but reliable effects on behaviour change compared with not doing so (46 behaviour tests, 2,715 people, d+ = 0.32; Epton et al., 2015).

In schools, the effects were small and varied with the setting. In a meta-analysis of 58 studies of values-affirmation writing in classrooms, there was a small effect for students facing identity threat, such as a stereotype about their group (g = 0.15), and almost none for other students (g = 0.01; Wu et al., 2021). A replication with over 1,200 students in one school district found no effect (Hanselman et al., 2017), and a reanalysis of the data from a well-known 2010 study found no improvement in women’s grades (Serra-Garcia et al., 2020).

So why does it still feel true? People tend to seek and interpret evidence in ways that fit what they already believe; this is called confirmation bias (Nickerson, 1998). Wishes that came true are remembered and those that did not are forgotten. If something good happens on a day you wrote affirmations, it is easy to feel the two are connected, and such illusions of causality, believing two unrelated events are causally linked, can happen to anyone, like optical illusions (Matute et al., 2015). Why descriptions that fit everyone feel personal is covered in the guide to the Barnum effect.

When something you thought about happens, you may also feel you caused it. In one experiment, spectators who first pictured a peer’s basketball shots going in were more likely to feel they had influenced his success (Pronin et al., 2006). The illusion of control describes how features of skill situations, such as choice or competition, make people inappropriately confident in chance situations (Langer, 1975). Later experiments, though, struggled to reproduce this effect (Clark & Wohl, 2022).

People also tend to think good things are more likely, and bad things less likely, to happen to them than to others. In a 1980 study, 258 college students rated their own chances of 42 events as above average for good events and below average for bad ones (Weinstein, 1980). Self-fulfilling prophecies, where expectations change behaviour and so affect outcomes, do occur, but a review of 35 years of research on teachers’ expectations found these effects typically small (Jussim & Harber, 2005).

Even the placebo effect, feeling better through expectation alone, was not found to have important clinical effects in general in an analysis of 202 trials comparing placebo with no treatment. It could affect patient-reported symptoms such as pain and nausea, though even this was hard to tell apart from biased reporting (Hróbjartsson & Gøtzsche, 2010). Believers’ sense of things and actual outcomes also diverged: in US surveys, people with stronger belief saw themselves as more successful and expected more future success, but the belief was unrelated to their actual income or education (Dixon et al., 2025).

So what does help? Picturing a desired future and then imagining the real obstacles in the way is called mental contrasting (Oettingen & Schwörer, 2013). Adding if-then plans for when, where and how to get past those obstacles gives WOOP (Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan; called MCII in research). In a meta-analysis of 21 field studies (24 effect sizes, 15,907 people), WOOP raised goal attainment by a small to medium amount compared with control groups (g = 0.336). Corrected for publication bias, the effect was smaller, 0.242, and 87.44% of the participants (13,909) came from two studies in a single paper (Wang et al., 2021).

For health behaviours, mental contrasting had a small effect over up to four weeks (1,528 people, g = 0.28; Cross & Sheffield, 2019). In an experiment that randomly assigned 77 fifth graders at an urban US school, children taught WOOP improved their grades, attendance and conduct more than children taught a positive-thinking strategy (Duckworth et al., 2013).

If-then plans on their own help too. In a meta-analysis of 94 studies, people who made such plans reached their goals to a medium-to-large degree more than people who only set goals (d = 0.65; Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006; Rozental et al., 2018). A recent analysis of 642 tests found effect sizes of 0.27 to 0.66 depending on the kind of outcome, and larger effects when plans had a proper if-then form, people really wanted to reach the goal, and the plans were rehearsed (Sheeran et al., 2025). How to do it is covered in procrastination: what helps.

The goal itself matters as well. A review of goal-setting theory reports that the effects of specific, difficult goals hold across people, tasks and countries (Locke & Latham, 2006). Belief in your ability (self-efficacy) was linked with work performance across 114 studies (correlation 0.38; Stajkovic & Luthans, 1998), but when the same people were followed over time, self-efficacy was mainly a product of past performance rather than the driver of future performance (Sitzmann & Yeo, 2013). Doing things builds belief more than belief brings results. What self-efficacy is and where it comes from are covered in the self-efficacy guide.

Optimism and gratitude are not magic, but they mean something. The tendency to expect good things in general (optimism) was linked with a lower risk of cardiovascular events and death in an analysis of 15 cohort studies (229,391 people), but these were observational studies, so optimism cannot be called the cause (Rozanski et al., 2019). Gratitude practices such as a gratitude journal raised well-being slightly compared with control conditions in a meta-analysis of studies from 28 countries (g = 0.19), with differences between countries (Choi et al., 2025). There was no evidence that they work better than other good activities (Davis et al., 2016).

The belief that positive thinking beats illness can be a burden for patients. In a systematic review of 26 studies of coping style and survival from cancer and 11 of recurrence, most studies of fighting spirit (10 studies) or helplessness and hopelessness (12 studies) found no significant link with survival or recurrence. The authors wrote that people with cancer should not feel pressured into adopting particular coping styles to improve survival (Petticrew et al., 2002). A critical review also argues that claims commonly made about cancer in positive psychology do not fit the evidence (Coyne & Tennen, 2010).

Yet such beliefs are common. In a survey of 611 people in Medellín, Colombia, 47% thought that holding anger, resentment and hatred carried a moderate or high risk of causing cancer, and 77.3% thought that facing the disease with fighting spirit had a moderate to high positive effect on the response to treatment; reading self-help books was linked with these views (Higuita-Gutiérrez et al., 2022). An ethicist warns that extreme positive thinking may promote alternative medicine that replaces effective treatment and ends up blaming people who are ill (Andrade, 2019). Illness is not caused by failing to think positively, and treatment should be decided with your doctors.

There is also what is popularly called “toxic positivity”. It is not a research term, but academics have asked whether the pressure to always be positive may itself add to unhappiness (Held, 2002). In an experiment, women led to value happiness reacted less positively to a happy emotion induction than a control group (Mauss et al., 2011). By contrast, people who habitually accept negative emotions and thoughts without judging them had better psychological health (1,003 people; Ford et al., 2018).

Money calls for care as well. In US surveys, people with stronger belief were more drawn to risky investments and more likely to report having been bankrupt (an odds ratio of 1.42 per scale point, among 353 people). But the authors stressed that this was a small, correlational link that cannot show cause (Dixon et al., 2025). Experiments also suggest that positive fantasies lead people to prefer information about the pros over the cons, which can lead to poor decisions even when they deliberate carefully later (Kappes & Oettingen, 2012).

Myth 1: If you think it, it will happen. We found no evidence that thoughts draw outcomes to us. People with strong belief did not have higher incomes or more education (Dixon et al., 2025), and positive fantasies about a desired future predicted lower effort and performance, not higher (Oettingen & Mayer, 2002). When something you thought about happens, it is simply easy to feel you caused it (Pronin et al., 2006).

Myth 2: Negative thoughts make bad things happen. The feeling that thinking something makes it likelier to happen is called thought-action fusion, a thinking bias that researchers study (Shafran & Rachman, 2004). If such thoughts are frightening and hard to shake off, see the OCD guide. People who habitually accept negative emotions and thoughts, rather than pushing them away, actually had better psychological health (Ford et al., 2018).

Myth 3: Write an affirmation 100 times and it will come true. None of the studies we looked at for this guide tested writing something 100 times. Research on affirmations is also mixed: a 2009 experiment found they backfired in people with low self-esteem (Wood et al., 2009), but a 2020 replication found neither a benefit nor a backfire (Flynn & Bordieri, 2020).

Myth 4: It is a scientifically proven law. Proponents of the law of attraction often claim that quantum physics proves the power of thought, but this has been called a badly misguided interpretation of quantum entanglement (Andrade, 2019). It is called a “law”, but we found no experiment showing that thoughts draw outcomes to us.

Myth 5: Thinking positively cures illness. In studies of people with cancer, coping styles such as fighting spirit or hopelessness were mostly unrelated to survival or recurrence (Petticrew et al., 2002). Placebo, compared with no treatment, was not found to have important effects in general (Hróbjartsson & Gøtzsche, 2010). Studies do link an optimistic disposition with health, but they are only observational (Rozanski et al., 2019). Decide on treatment with your doctors.

Q. Is believing in the law of attraction harmful? A. It is not harmful for everyone. It can become a problem when it replaces planning, treatment or careful money decisions (Dixon et al., 2025; Andrade, 2019). Nor is it a reason to blame believers: feeling that unrelated things are causes is an illusion that can happen to anyone (Matute et al., 2015).

Q. Does visualization do nothing, then? A. Picturing only the result is different from rehearsing the process. Students who pictured how they would study studied more (Pham & Taylor, 1999), and imagery training worked better together with physical practice (Simonsmeier et al., 2021).

Q. What can I try instead of affirmations? A. Try WOOP: picture what you want, then the obstacles, then an if-then plan (Wang et al., 2021). If you need kind words for yourself, balanced statements close to the facts work better than forced affirmations, and how to build self-compassion may help too.

Q. Is a gratitude journal a form of manifesting? A. No. Gratitude practice is not about sending something out to the universe but about your own well-being, and its effect was small but real (Choi et al., 2025).

Q. Can the self-esteem test tell me whether affirmations suit me? A. No. The self-esteem test looks at how you see yourself right now; it does not predict whether affirmations will help.

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