Where “Thoughts Create Reality” Came From

A list on a phone is titled “what I want.” A thought says: see it as already yours, and it will come. KTT counts that as a thought, conscious or not, and the claim behind it starts with one: a thought held on purpose. In every version read here, the first step is a thought, an image or an intention. Whether the rest follows is a separate question. The sources read for this article trace where the claim came from and what has been tested. They did not test whether a thought comes first.

Where the claim came from

Phineas Quimby (1802 to 1866), a healer in Maine, is widely seen as the founder of New Thought. He came to believe that illness was a product of wrong thinking, and that correcting the thought corrected the body. Scholars of the movement do not agree on who founded it. Prentice Mulford (1834 to 1891) was another early voice. In 1906, William Walker Atkinson published Thought Vibration, or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World, which one source calls the first known use of that phrase as a named principle. In 1910, Wallace Wattles published The Science of Getting Rich, and in 2006 Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret brought the claim to millions of readers.

An old name on a new book

The Kybalion appeared in 1908 under the name “Three Initiates,” often identified as Atkinson. It presents itself as a study of the Hermetic philosophy of ancient Egypt and Greece, and its first principle holds that the universe is mental. Reviewers describe it as a modern tract that reads old Hermetic ideas through New Thought. The claim of a secret ancient chain of transmission has no documentary proof.

What has been tested

One part of the claim has been tested: what a thought about a wished-for future does to the person who has it. In four studies, Gabriele Oettingen and Doris Mayer (2002) compared two kinds of thinking about the future. Expecting a desired future to be likely predicted high effort and success. Experiencing positive thoughts and images of that future predicted lower effort and less success. In a 2011 follow-up, Heather Kappes and Oettingen induced positive fantasies in the laboratory. Those fantasies lowered physiological activation, measured by systolic blood pressure. The researchers explain it this way: an imagined success can feel like having arrived.

These studies were about effort. They did not test whether a thought acts on events outside the person.

What is not known

Whether a thought held on purpose acts on anything beyond the person who holds it is not tested in the studies read here.

Whether the stronger form of the claim, in which every outcome traces to a thought, can be tested at all is open. A life event is not a verdict on a person’s thoughts.

Whether the studies by Oettingen hold for every kind of wish is also open. They covered a few life tasks.