What is the Law of Attraction?

Learn about different explanations of the law of attraction.

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. 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.

“Happy people produce. Bored people consume.”
― Stephen Richards

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 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.

In Sum

Hopefully this article cleared 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.

References

● Byrne, D. (1961). Interpersonal attraction and attitude similarity. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 62, 713-715.

● Byrne, D. (1971). The attraction paradigm. New York: Academic Press.

● Byrne, D., & Griffitt, W. (1966). A developmental investigation of the law of attraction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4(6), 699–702.

● Byrne, R. (2006). The secret. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.

● Fasce, A., & Picó, A. (2019). Conceptual foundations and validation of the pseudoscientific belief scale. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 33(4), 617–628.

● Festinger, L. (1962). A theory of cognitive dissonance (Vol. 2). Stanford university press.

● Ilić, S., & Damnjanović, K. (2021). The effect of source credibility on bullshit receptivity. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 35(5), 1193-1205.

● Kaplan, M. F., & Anderson, N. H. (1973). Information integration theory and reinforcement theory as approaches to interpersonal attraction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 28, 301-312.

● Montoya, R. M., & Horton, R. S. (2013). A meta-analytic investigation of the processes underlying the similarity-attraction effect. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 30(1), 64-94.

● Neimeyer, G. J., & Neimeyer, R. A. (1981). Functional similarity and interpersonal attraction. Journal of Research in Personality, 15(4), 427-435