Scroll through TikTok for a few minutes and you’ll likely stumble onto a “manifestation coach” promising that your dream job, dream partner, or dream bank balance is just a few positive affirmations away. The hashtag has racked up tens of billions of views, and the underlying idea, popularized by Rhonda Byrne’s 2006 book The Secret, has sold tens of millions of copies in book form alone. Despite all this cultural traction, the psychology of people who actually believe in manifestation has received surprisingly little academic scrutiny.
A set of three studies published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin set out to change that. The researchers built a tool to measure how strongly someone believes in manifestation, then used it to examine what those beliefs are linked to: financial behavior, perceptions of success, and judgments about the future. The short version of what they found is a paradox. People who believe they can manifest success feel more successful and more optimistic about their prospects, but show no evidence of actually being more successful by objective measures, and appear more prone to risky financial decisions.
What exactly is “manifestation”?
Lucas J. Dixon of the University of Queensland Business School and his colleagues define manifestation as the belief that you can attract success into your life by aligning your thoughts, emotions, and symbolic actions with the outcomes you want. Popular versions range from writing yourself pretend checks to repeating affirmations like “I am so grateful I am wealthy.” The underlying logic is that thoughts transmit a kind of energy that the universe (or a higher power) sends back in material form.
The authors distinguish this from garden-variety optimism or goal setting. Setting aspirational goals and behaving in ways consistent with them is well-studied in psychology, and positive expectations can genuinely affect outcomes through what’s sometimes called a self-fulfilling prophecy. Manifestation goes further by invoking a pseudoscientific or spiritual mechanism. That, the researchers argue, puts it closer to “magical thinking,” which psychologists define as believing you can influence distant events without any known physical means.
Building a manifestation scale
Because no direct measure of manifestation belief existed, the first task was to build one. The team started by pulling quotes from nine popular self-help books and testing candidate survey items with pilot participants and experts. The resulting 11-item Manifestation Scale asks respondents to rate their agreement with statements that fall into two related groups.
The first group, which the researchers call “personal power,” covers beliefs about the self, such as “Visualizing a successful outcome causes it to be drawn closer to me” or “I can speak success into existence through positive self-talk.” The second, “cosmic collaboration,” covers beliefs about outside forces, such as “I attract success into my life with the help of the universe or a higher power.” The two subscales were highly correlated, suggesting they reflect one broader belief system.
In the first study, with 306 U.S. participants recruited through Prolific, the scale held together statistically, produced stable answers when the same people took it three weeks later, and appeared to be widely endorsed. About 35% of participants showed at least some agreement with manifestation beliefs. Scores didn’t differ much by age, gender, or income. Black and Hispanic respondents tended to score higher on the cosmic collaboration items, a pattern the authors suggest may reflect stronger religious or spiritual framings of success within some communities.
What manifestation belief is linked to
In the second study, with 382 participants, the researchers tested how manifestation belief related to other psychological constructs. The strongest associations were with non-religious spirituality, a bias called “positive thought-action fusion” (the sense that thinking good thoughts makes good things more likely to happen), and belief in karmic justice. Religiosity and dispositional hope were also linked but more weakly.
Participants who scored higher on the Manifestation Scale were much more likely to have favorable attitudes toward success-industry figures known for promoting manifestation ideas, including Rhonda Byrne, Napoleon Hill, Tony Robbins, and Oprah Winfrey, and were modestly more likely to have consumed their books, programs, or media. That’s the kind of result you’d want to see if the scale is capturing what it claims to capture.
The study also probed how manifestation belief relates to people’s sense of success. Manifesters were more likely to say they had already attained common life goals (wealth, fame, image, relationships, growth, social contribution), and more likely to believe they would achieve such goals in the future, particularly the externally oriented ones around money, fame, and image. Importantly, the Manifestation Scale continued to predict confidence about future success even after controlling for current attainment, demographics, and hope. In other words, the effect wasn’t simply that more successful people are more confident about the future.
Feeling successful vs. being successful
Here’s where the paradox comes into focus. In the first study, manifestation belief showed no significant relationship with income or educational attainment. To the extent that income and education serve as rough proxies for objective success, manifesters weren’t doing any better than non-manifesters. They just felt they were, and felt more sure they would continue to do so.
The third study, with 400 participants, pushed this further by examining financial behavior and judgments about unrealistic goals. Higher scores on the Manifestation Scale were associated with a stronger general preference for risk-taking, a higher likelihood of owning cryptocurrency (but not traditional stocks), a higher likelihood of having been a victim of fraud in the past five years, and a higher likelihood of having declared bankruptcy personally or in a business. For each one-unit increase on the scale, the odds of having been bankrupt rose by roughly 42%, and the odds of currently holding cryptocurrency rose by about 33%.
These links held up when the researchers controlled for other psychological variables like intuitive versus rational decision-making styles, ability to delay gratification, and core self-evaluations (a composite of self-esteem, self-efficacy, emotional stability, and internal locus of control). The Manifestation Scale added predictive power on top of those constructs.
Get-rich-quick thinking
The third study also asked participants to imagine an ambitious scenario: earning $300,000 a year from more than 100,000 loyal fans of their most valued skill, and making a positive difference in thousands of lives in the process. Manifesters rated this outcome as more likely and said they could reach it in less time than non-manifesters did. They also more strongly endorsed the idea that you can “get rich quick with the right advice and know-how.”
The authors interpret this pattern as a form of overconfidence specific to manifestation belief, separate from general self-esteem or hopefulness. They argue that this overconfidence could make manifesters more receptive to claims from success-industry figures promising fast, outsized results, and could blunt the effect of disclosures (like the typical earnings statements required in some multi-level marketing advertising) that regulators use to help people gauge risk.
Caveats
The studies are correlational, so they can’t establish that manifestation beliefs cause risky financial decisions or inflated expectations. The causal arrow could run in either direction, or both. People drawn to magical thinking might gravitate toward success-industry material; alternatively, exposure to that material might cultivate manifestation beliefs. The researchers also note that manifesters’ higher ratings of current success might partly reflect the practice itself, since “acting as if” you’re already successful is a core manifestation technique and could color self-report answers.
The samples were drawn entirely from U.S. participants on Prolific, and the authors flag cross-cultural replication as an open question. The predictive value of the two subscales separately, rather than combined, also warrants more examination.
One point the authors raise about real-world consequences deserves attention. Because manifestation frameworks often encourage reinterpreting setbacks as a lack of sufficient belief or “vibrational alignment,” failures may not prompt the kind of course correction they otherwise would. In low-stakes contexts that reframing may function as a coping mechanism. In higher-stakes domains, including health decisions where people might delay medical treatment in favor of visualization, the authors argue it carries real potential for harm.
