Manifestation

Quimby and the mind-cure movement

The Mary Baker Eddy Papers project gives Phineas Parkhurst Quimby's dates as 16 February 1802 to 16 January 1866 and places him in Belfast, Maine, from 1804. According to that account he trained as a clockmaker, became a mesmerist who toured with a somnambulist named Lucius Burkmar, and later used mesmerism and suggestion for healing, establishing a practice in Portland, Maine, in 1859. He is described as believing that mesmerism could change a patient's 'false beliefs', and Mary Baker Eddy became his patient on 10 October 1862 before founding Christian Science, which the same source describes as diverging from his methods.

A 2019 Maine Public radio program describes Quimby as the father of the New Thought movement and traces the modern law of attraction, the idea that good things can be made to happen through positive thoughts, to his teaching. This is a journalistic summary of scholars' views, and the sources reviewed here do not document the historical chain between Quimby and later popular teaching in detail.

Wattles and early twentieth-century writing

Wallace D. Wattles (1860-1911) published The Science of Getting Rich in 1910, according to its Project Gutenberg record, which classes it as New Thought. The book states that thought is the only power that can produce riches from a 'formless substance' and describes a 'certain way' of thinking in which a person holds a clear mental picture with faith and purpose. The same text also states that personal action must supplement thought, so a reading of it as thought alone is not supported by the passage.

Popular and religious spread

A TIME report of 28 December 2006 describes the low-budget film The Secret, which presents the law of attraction as the belief that thoughts and emotions influence real-world outcomes. It says the DVD sold more than 500,000 units in six months and that producer Rhonda Byrne assembled the film from interviews with 24 teachers. The report quotes a business partner as saying that wealth was deliberately emphasized to appeal to a mass audience.

A related strand appears in religious teaching. A 2006 Pew Research Center survey of pentecostals in ten countries reported that majorities in all ten agreed that God grants good health and relief from sickness to believers with enough faith, and that most pentecostals in nine of the ten countries said God grants material prosperity to all believers with enough faith. The survey measures belief, and it does not show that these beliefs descend from New Thought. Open-access scholarship on that question was not found in this review, and the contributions of Prentice Mulford, Thomas Troward and Napoleon Hill are not covered by the sources reviewed.

Manifestation, law of attraction and positive thinking

In popular use, manifestation and manifesting usually refer to bringing a wished-for circumstance about through thought, intention or visualization, and the law of attraction is the name for the claimed principle behind it. The TIME report defines the law of attraction as the belief that thoughts and emotions influence outcomes in the world. None of the sources reviewed traces the history of the word manifestation itself, so its relation to older religious uses of the term is not established here.

The terms are not interchangeable with positive thinking in general. Psychology research distinguishes positive expectations, meaning a judgment that a desired future is likely, from positive fantasies, meaning experiencing thoughts and images of a desired future positively. Researchers have also studied mental contrasting, in which a person imagines a desired future and then the obstacles in the way, and the contrast with indulging, which is dwelling on the positive future alone.

Confusable ideas

Manifestation is also distinct from the placebo effect, which concerns responses to inactive treatments in trials, and from positive self-statements, which are repeated statements such as affirmations. A large survey-and-experiment study of self-statements found people often use them and believe them to be effective, which is a claim about belief and not about results. Related pages on this site include Guided Imagery, Faith Healing and Distance Healing.

How the idea is used in teaching

Adherents and popular teachers describe manifestation as a way to shape wealth, relationships and circumstances. The TIME report says the film presented visualization as able to bring about outcomes ranging from winning a lottery to finding a parking space. Wattles's text, as described above, couples a held mental picture with faith, an absence of doubt and fear, and efficient daily action. This page gives no instructions and does not recommend any of these methods.

In religious and counseling settings

In some pentecostal and charismatic settings, the Pew survey found that large shares of members say faith brings health and prosperity. Quimby's account, as summarized by the Mary Baker Eddy Papers project, held that illness could be changed by altering false beliefs. In counseling, researchers have developed mental contrasting with implementation intentions, a structured goal-pursuit method that pairs imagery of a desired future with attention to obstacles and if-then plans. That research tradition is separate from manifestation teaching and is discussed under Research and Evidence.

Wealth, success and circumstances

Wattles presented thought as a means to wealth and described poverty as a result of ignorance of the 'certain way' of thinking. The film described in the TIME report promoted visualization toward desired outcomes, with wealth emphasized, and its business partner said that emphasis was deliberate. These are claims made by the teachers and producers, and the sources reviewed do not test them.

Health, mood and self-esteem

The Pew survey records belief among pentecostals that faith brings good health and material prosperity, and Quimby is described as teaching that mind could overcome illness by changing false beliefs. Positive self-statements are widely believed to improve mood and self-esteem, according to a 2009 study that tested that belief. Whether manifestation itself affects health has not been established by the sources reviewed.

Positive fantasies and effort

Oettingen and Mayer reported in 2002 four studies in which participants were job-seeking graduates, students with a crush on a peer, undergraduates anticipating an exam and patients undergoing hip-replacement surgery. Positive expectations predicted high effort and successful performance, whereas the reverse was true for positive fantasies with follow-up of up to two years. A 2013 review by Oettingen and Schwörer cites related findings, including that overweight women who fantasized about losing weight lost fewer pounds over a year.

Kappes and Oettingen reported in 2012 three studies in which positive fantasies about an idealized future created a preference for information about the advantages of pursuing it over its disadvantages, which the authors suggest may lead to poor decisions. These are mostly correlational or laboratory findings from one research group about how people think about their own effort. They do not test whether thoughts attract external events.

Mental contrasting

Mental contrasting with implementation intentions has been tested more widely. A 2021 meta-analysis of 21 studies with 24 effect sizes and 15,907 participants found a small to medium effect on goal attainment (g = 0.336), with publication bias suggesting true effects may be smaller. A 2019 review of health behavior, with 1,528 participants in its meta-analysis, found an effect of 0.28 at up to four weeks and 0.38 at up to three months in a subset of five studies, and adding implementation intentions did not further strengthen the effect in a small subset.

In one randomized trial, 77 fifth graders from a low-income urban school learned either mental contrasting with implementation intentions or a positive-thinking control strategy. Third-quarter grades, attendance and conduct improved more in the contrasting group, though effects weakened by the fourth quarter. The research shows that attention to obstacles can support goal pursuit in some settings, not that visualizing a wish alone brings it about.

Self-statements and expectation

In two experiments reported in 2009, participants with low self-esteem who repeated a positive self-statement felt worse than those who did not, while participants with high self-esteem felt better, to a limited degree. A 2010 Cochrane review of 234 randomized trials covering 60 conditions found no important clinical effects of placebo in general, though placebo could influence patient-reported outcomes, especially pain and nausea, and such effects were hard to separate from biased reporting. Placebo evidence should not be carried over to manifestation.

Whether the central claim has been tested

No controlled study testing that thoughts or intentions attract matching external events, as the law of attraction claims, was identified in this review. Searches in PubMed and a research-paper index surfaced only the psychological studies above, although the searches were limited. A skeptic's essay argues that the brain's magnetic fields are far too weak to transmit thoughts as the claim implies, which is a critic's argument.

Illness, blame and pressure to think positively

A 2002 BMJ systematic review of 26 studies on survival and 11 on recurrence found little consistent evidence that psychological coping styles, including fighting spirit and helplessness, play an important part in cancer outcomes. Positive findings tended to come from small or flawed studies, and the authors wrote that people with cancer should not feel pressured into adopting particular coping styles, noting that such pressure may add to psychological burden. A 2007 analysis of two radiation oncology trials found no significant univariate or multivariate effect of baseline emotional well-being on overall survival in head and neck cancer.

Coyne and colleagues argued in 2010 that claims linking positive psychological states to cancer outcomes lack empirical support and called the interpretation a self-perpetuating story line. That is one side of a published debate. The reply by Aspinwall and Tedeschi was not reviewed here. The essay by Shermer states that the claim that a person is blocking money with their thoughts implies that victims cause their own suffering, and critics quoted in TIME's report raised concern about get-rich-quick messaging.

Care boundaries

The sources reviewed do not document studied cases of financial loss or of delayed medical care linked to manifestation teaching, and no professional body position statement on it was found. The review of coping and cancer supports the general principle that positive thinking should not be treated as a substitute for medical treatment. Positive self-statements may also backfire for people with low self-esteem, per the 2009 experiments. People who feel distressed, or who are making health or financial decisions, can raise these questions with a qualified clinician or financial adviser.