Law of Attraction: Definition, Quotes, & Science​

By Charlie Huntington, M.A., Ph.D. Candidate
​Reviewed by Tchiki Davis, M.A., Ph.D.
You may have heard that the law of attraction means that you can think what you want into manifesting in your life. However, scientific research has not supported this law of attraction.​
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I had a friend once who, each morning, would spend several minutes saying out loud what he wanted to have happen in his life that day. On any given day, his desire might have been to find a romantic partner, to be focused on his work, to make healthy choices, or some combination of goals. His daily affirmations, which often sounded something like, “I will find a partner who is a good match for me,” were a practice he began because he had heard that this behavior would create the results he was looking for.​
I listened to him talk about this practice of his with a mixture of skepticism and hope. I was impressed by his dedication to doing it each day, and it was easy to imagine, knowing how effective things such as gratitude practices can be, that these affirmations might actually help him manifest the changes that he wanted in his life. At the same time, I wondered whether there was any science, any evidence base, behind a practice like this.

My friend was practicing the law of attraction as he understood it, and as many people understand it. Unfortunately, this law of attraction is not supported by any scientific research. Among psychologists, however, there is a different law of attraction with a strong evidence base. Let’s look at the science (or lack thereof) behind these laws of attraction.​
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What Is the Law of Attraction? (A Definition)​

To social scientists, there are two laws of attraction. The one you are more likely to have heard of is built on the idea, first proposed in the 19th century but more recently and popularly described in the book and movie titled The Secret (Byrne, 2006), that positive thoughts result in positive experiences in our lives, while negative thoughts result in negative outcomes (Ilic & Damnjanovic, 2021). In The Secret, Rhonda Byrne, a television writer and producer, wrote that when people envision themselves as getting what they want, they attract to themselves the results they are looking for (Byrne, 2006). By contrast, when they focus on the negative things in their lives, they get more of those negative experiences. This is based on the belief that our thoughts have an energetic power to channel positive and negative energies around us.

Pseudoscience & The Law of Attraction​
​Unfortunately, this is not a theory that has any scientific support, leading social scientists to often cite it as a prime example of pseudoscience (Ilic & Damnjanovic, 2021), or an idea that claims to be scientifically grounded or based in facts but is either not supported by scientific evidence or is impossible to prove true or false. In fact, it is so conclusively understood by scientists to be a form of pseudoscience that it was included as an item in a recent scientific measure of belief in pseudoscientific ideas (Fasce & Pico, 2019).
 
We should acknowledge that, like many examples of pseudoscience, there are ways that this law of attraction makes intuitive sense to us. I know I personally have a hard time spending time around people who are consistently negative, while I am drawn to people who seem to radiate positive energy. Research tells us that when pseudoscience is promoted by people who seem more credible, it is more strongly believed, too (Ilic & Damnjanovic, 2021). Also, some of the “techniques” of the law of attraction, such as using affirmative language and cognitive reframing tools, are sometimes used in psychotherapy. However, the law of attraction as it is practiced has no scientific evidence to support it (Ilic & Damnjanovic, 2021).

A ‘Different’ Law of Attraction?
At the same time, there is another law of attraction, which is confusingly also associated with somebody with the last name Byrne. Psychologist Donn Byrne is one of the originators of what is called by psychologists the law of attraction, “law of similarity”, or similarity-attraction effect (Byrne, 1961). This law is simple to understand and similar to the pseudoscientific law of attraction but has a crucial difference. This law states that “like attracts like”, but through simply being similar, not through thought. For example, we naturally want to interact with strangers who seem to have more in common with us than with strangers who are less like us (Byrne, 1961). We also naturally gravitate toward people who look like us and share other physical characteristics with us.

Is the Law of Attraction Real?

As I hope I have established by now, the pseudoscientific idea that we can attract positive events into our lives simply by wishing them into existence is not a real, evidence-based phenomenon. Instead, it is an example of what is called thought-action fusion, or the idea that simply having certain thoughts means certain events will occur (Craig & Lafreniere, 2016; Shafran et al., 1996).
 
This is what cognitive-behavioral therapists would call a thinking error. For example, some people with obsessive-compulsive disorder are bombarded by intrusive thoughts related to the possibility that they have harmed another person. Over time, they may come to believe that if they are thinking about it so much, it must be true, or will become true (Shafran et al., 1996). Many people with mental health disorders benefit from separating their thoughts from their actions more definitively.

The Law of Attraction: Magical Thinking
The pseudoscientific law of attraction has also been described as a form of magical thinking (Kingdon et al., 2012; Shafran et al., 1996). Unfortunately, this unsubstantiated way of thinking is often used by people seeking to defraud others or enroll them in cults or multilevel marketing schemes (Marmor-Lavie et al., 2009; Potaka, 2019). The pseudoscientific law of attraction banks on the appeal of the idea that our thoughts could be this powerful (Larsen & Thomsen, 2019). And the promise it offers, but cannot deliver on, may distract people from taking more meaningful and effective action to address their problems (Andrade, 2019).
 
If you would like a more interactive demonstration of how the pseudoscientific law of attraction is not real, you could try watching this video:​​

Video: The Law Of Attraction: Fact Or Fiction?

Law of Attraction and Manifestation​

Could we really simply manifest better outcomes in our lives by thinking in a certain way? Here’s a good example of where the pseudoscientific law of attraction can’t be proven. It seems, for example, that people who are more optimistic often have better health outcomes than less optimistic people (Giltay et al., 2004; Lamers et al., 2012). This does not mean that their positive thinking causes those outcomes, though. It is just as possible that people who are healthier in the first place tend to have more positive thoughts (Ong et al., 2011). There is no way to prove that the effect goes in either direction.​

Law of Attraction in Psychology

Unlike the pseudoscientific law of attraction, there is a lot of research to support the similarity-attraction effect. For example, in one early study on the phenomenon, Byrne and Griffitt (1966) asked children and adolescents to fill out a scale reflecting their personal attitudes. Then, they were shown the same scale as it had supposedly been filled out by other children (in reality, it was created by the researchers). The more similarity there was between the participants’ attitudes and the other students’ scales, the more interested the children in the study were in socializing with those children.
 
Again unlike the pseudoscientific law of attraction, this law of attraction was also based in scientific theories with a strong evidence base. Byrne (1971) proposed that people naturally look for things in the world that confirm their understanding of the world. We look for experiences that validate our sense of how things are.

Law of Attraction: Similarity-Attraction Effect
​We develop this tendency for two reasons, according to Byrne. First, in accordance with classical conditioning ideas, it feels good to see positive aspects of ourselves mirrored in others; because we learn that spending time with people like us is pleasant, we try to have more experiences like that (Neimeyer & Neimeyer, 1981). Second, being around people who affirm our understanding of the world reduces our experiences of cognitive dissonance, or the necessity of understanding how two things that are contradictory can be true at the same time (Festinger, 1962).
 
We are only drawn to the other person to the extent that we know them to be similar to us (Kaplan & Anderson, 1973). We cannot know what is inside another person’s head unless they or somebody else tell us, and I think this explains why we are drawn to people who are similar in ways that are visible to us. For example, it seems like a reasonable assumption that two people who are matched in gender, sexual orientation, race, and socioeconomic status, are more likely to have shared experiences and opinions than two people who differ in all these characteristics.
 
Across hundreds of studies, these characteristics of the scientific law of attraction have been validated (Montoya & Horton, 2013). People are more attractive to us the more similar they are to us; both appearance and attitudes attract us in this way, and the more we know about our similarities, the more attraction we can feel.​​​

Examples of the Law of Attraction

For me, the law of attraction is very present in my experiences on dating apps. I find myself drawn to people with similar priorities, similar hobbies, and similar backgrounds, such as growing up in New England. At the same time, the people who show interest in me on dating apps usually do so because of our similarities. (For example, therapists seem to be attracted to each other – go ahead and make your jokes about children raised by two therapists now.)

Perhaps my favorite example of the law of attraction from my own life comes from my first day of preschool. When my mother picked me up, I announced that I had made a new friend, but I could not tell her his name, or anything about him except that he was wearing a Barney t-shirt. I was watching recorded episodes of Barney endlessly at this age, so seeing another child in a Barney t-shirt meant, to my small child’s brain, that we would be friends eventually if we weren’t already.​

How Does the Law of Attraction Work?

Here is another example of how the real law of attraction works. A study of legal cases presented in courts in Hong Kong found that, even controlling for many characteristics of the people involved, lawyers were more likely to win cases when they were more similar to the judge in the case in terms of their educational backgrounds and career histories (Verhagen & Yam, 2021).​

Law of Attraction in Relationships

We seem to be drawn to other people who are, or seem, similar to us – especially when it comes to romantic partners (Montoya et al., 2008; Tidwell et al., 2013). It appears that it is the overall levels of similarities that we perceive, rather than our actual levels of similarity, that determine how drawn we are to other people (Tidwell et al., 2013).
 
Psychologists are not certain about whether this pattern matters throughout a relationship or mostly at the point of initial attraction. It seems that we often end up liking people the more time we spend with them, regardless of how similar we were at first (Sunnafrank, 1985). The law of attraction may be more in effect when we truly do not know a person, such as a stranger (Montoya et al., 2008). So, in this sense, the law of attraction may be best understood as a way we respond to meeting new people. When we do not have a lot of other information to go on, it is the similarities we think we can observe that determine how attracted we are to the other person.​

Quotes on the Law of Attraction

Here are some quotes about the law of attraction. Keep in mind that while our thoughts do matter, they do not determine the outcomes in our lives.

  • “Here’s the problem. Most people are thinking about what they don’t want, and they’re wondering why it shows up over and over again.” – John Assaraf  
  • “Every conscious thought you have, every moment you spend on an idea, is a commitment to be stuck with that idea and with aspects of that level of thinking, for the rest of your life. Spending just 10 seconds focusing on a topic that does not serve your interests is to invest your energy along a path that will continue to draw from you and define you.” – Kevin Michel  
  • “Imagination is everything, it is the preview of life's coming attractions.” – Albert Einstein​  
  • “A person is what he or she thinks about all day long.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson ​

Articles Related to Law of Attraction​

​Want to learn more? Check out these articles:

Books Related to Law of Attraction​

If you’d like to keep learning more, here are a few books that you might be interested in.

Final Thoughts on the Law of Attraction​

I hope this article clears up the different laws of attraction. As appealing as the pseudoscientific law of attraction might be, it does not have a scientific founding. Meanwhile, the real law of attraction can help explain whom we are attracted to and why, using psychological science as its foundation.​

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