Has any one of you actually seen the LAW OF ATTRACTION work in your life?

The law of attraction is nothing more than magical thinking bolstered by confirmation bias and selection bias. While there is some scientific evidence that dispositional optimism can help us avoid self-sabotaging behaviors, there is no evidence that it can make us better at something than we already are or bring about some particular state of affairs that we are hoping for. There’s also no evidence for the pseudotheories about positive and negative energy that underlie the whole idea.

It is also important to note that too much positive thinking can be bad for us. Hope must be tempered by realism or else we run a significant risk of sabotaging ourselves due to overconfidence. There’s an interesting study about all this here.

SavoirFaire – When we understand something, we tend to understand it from our personal selection bias (as you write it).
Those who work with natural and pure sciences get a chance to experiment things to get the essence, most common people just believe what they read, isn’t it?
How do you account for the word ‘scientific evidence’!? I am a computer scientist and I can’t deny the role of logic in programming and software development. But the idea of believing every phenomenon only when science has put a tick mark against it just doesn’t appeal to me. Some things are based more on experience, rather than a generalizable scientific confirmation to their definition.
I don’t know what others think but the idea of scientific explanation doesn’t hold true for many things. What do you say?

I agree with a lot of what @SavoirFaire said. Much of the idea behind the law of attraction is that if you constantly focus on the negative, things will remain negative and if you focus on the positive, good things will come. But, those things don’t change fact.

For example, growing up, I was the only one in my family with blonde hair and blue eyes. My parents and my brother have brown hair and brown eyes. My mom and dad believed I looked like my dad’s sister when she was younger, so they believed that’s where my looks came from. Fast forward 35 years and an Ancestry DNA test… and it turns out my “dad” is not really my dad. So, there’s no way my looks came from his sister, even though the picture they had of her did look like me when I was younger. They wanted to believe that and wanted everyone else to believe it, so that’s what they always went with when we talked about me not looking like them. No amount of believing that or positive thinking about it will change the DNA results since I have absolutely no genetic relationship with my “dad” or his sister.

It has worked in my life, but I choose not to write about specifics on this site due to the ridicule.

I’m with @Hawaii_Jake.
I will leave this video though, which after being aware of the law of attraction for some time, I believe best explains why it has helped in my life.

Hey, if you go around frowning at everyone, they’ll not be opening many doors for you. On the other hand, if you genuinely smile at everyone, and act like you’re an upbeat person, you’ll get all sorts of opportunities.

Sure. Be the change, sister.

@Khajuria9 , Because science is based on scientific method, it is verifiable. The statements made in science have to be testable by experiment. The Law of Attraction is not verifiable. If someone claims to have tried it and did not have success, you could always say they did not try hard enough. How would anyone know one way or the other? Without verifiability,it is difficult to take seriously.

IMHO, the “law of attraction” may be an as-yet-unproven (scientifically) result or iteration of the butterfly effect. Like many other phenomena, lack of scientific proof that it works or exists is not equal to proof it does not work or exist.

@Khajuria9 “When we understand something, we tend to understand it from our personal selection bias (as you write it).”

Sorry, but this makes no sense. Selection bias is not a perspective from which to view things. It is an error in the information gathering on which we base our opinion.

“Those who work with natural and pure sciences get a chance to experiment things to get the essence, most common people just believe what they read, isn’t it?”

Sure. But it’s not a good thing that human beings are so gullible. In any case, one does not have to be a scientist doing the actual experimentation to learn how to separate good data from bad data.

“How do you account for the word ‘scientific evidence’!?”

I have no idea what you are trying to ask with this sentence.

“But the idea of believing every phenomenon only when science has put a tick mark against it just doesn’t appeal to me.”

No one is asking you to do that, so this seems like a bit of a straw man. Science, after all, is not the only way we come to know things. No scientist has ever stopped by to confirm for me that my son exists, but that kind of belief doesn’t require such stringent evaluation or verification. Similarly, it isn’t science that tells me I can’t draw a figure that is both a perfect square and a perfect circle at the same time. I can figure that out just from the logical interaction of the two concepts.

But you asked for our opinions, and I gave you one based on the information that is currently available. You can believe in unicorns if you want to, but it is unreasonable to expect me to acquiesce to your worldview simply because you have the right to believe something without evidence. Indeed, what can be asserted without evidence can be rejected without evidence. So I have actually done more than my duty by giving you a response based on actual data.

One last note: belief does not have to be all or nothing. It is possible to believe in things with different levels of confidence. So we might give tentative credence to things we’ve read or that our personal experiences seem to suggest. But anyone can put up a website claiming that unicorns exist, and anecdotal evidence is extremely limited. A reasonable person proportions their belief to the evidence.

@SquirrelEStuff The video you shared is about dispositional optimism, goal-setting, and cognitive reframing. That’s not the law of attraction. The law of attraction claims that thoughts are objects made out of pure energy and that human beings, who are also made of pure energy, can manipulate reality by recalibrating their energy by thinking positive thoughts to attract positive events (which are somehow supposed to be attracted to us because “like energy attracts like” despite there being no claim that the events themselves are made of energy).

@Strauss How would the butterfly effect account for all of the claims made about positive and negative energy that are central to the whole idea of the law of attraction?