Joseph Murphy vs The Secret: same roots, different claims

What do Murphy and The Secret have in common?

A family tree. New Thought grew in the nineteenth century from Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–1866), a mesmerist turned mental healer, and spread through teachers such as Emma Curtis Hopkins. Divine Science, the church Murphy served, was first taught in San Francisco in 1888 by Malinda Cramer; Ernest Holmes published The Science of Mind in 1926. Murphy cites Quimby by name in his 1963 book.

The Secret draws on the same stream. Rhonda Byrne has said her starting point was a 1910 book on getting ahead by Wallace D. Wattles, another New Thought author. The skeptic writer Brian Dunning traces the same idea back to James Allen’s As a Man Thinketh (1902). Allen took his title from Proverbs 23:7, and Murphy’s own preface adapts the same verse: “as a man thinketh in his subconscious mind, so is he” (The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, 1963, preface).

Both books also share tools: a vivid mental picture of what you want, feeling as if it were already true, and gratitude. That is why readers move from one to the other so easily.

Where do they part ways?

The differences are in the frame around the tools: who is listening, what you are asked to do, and how much the book claims.

What a rough word count of Murphy’s 1963 text shows

Is The Secret simply Murphy with new packaging? On 20 October 2026 we searched one OCR transcription of the 1963 text (about 69,000 words) to see how much room the attraction idea takes in it. Treat the counts as approximate: scanning errors can hide or split a few words, and another edition would give slightly different numbers.

The verb is there: attract, attracts, attracted, attracting and attraction appear about 36 times. Sixteen of them are in chapter 14, on marriage, which has a section on finding an ideal husband and another on finding an ideal wife, and seven in chapter 10, on money. The three-word phrase that The Secret later made its subject appears three times, in chapters 1, 10 and 14. So it is fair to say the idea is already in Murphy.

But it is one image among many. In the same text, words built on “pray” appear about 178 times, “Infinite Intelligence” about 41 times and “subconscious” about 692 times. Murphy’s book is organized around prayer and his model of two minds; attraction is one way he describes the result. The Secret makes it the whole mechanism and drops the church around it.

What critics say about the attraction idea, and whether it applies to Murphy

The most common criticism is about blame. If thoughts cause events, misfortune becomes the person’s fault. Brian Dunning made this argument on Skeptoid in 2008, and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-sided (2009) described the guilt it can create in people who do not recover from an illness. Dunning also relayed the objection of doctors that the book presents positive thinking as an adequate substitute for their care.

The psychologist Peter Strelan, writing in 2024, called The Secret “a repackaging of the ‘power of positive thinking’” and pointed to illusory correlation: when a wish and an event come close together, we assume the first caused the second, and we look for cases that confirm the belief instead of testing it. That is how testimonials pile up.

Does this apply to Murphy? Partly, and fairness means saying so. In chapter 14, a woman who has had three husbands she finds too passive asks why she attracts such men, and Murphy answers that her own subconscious picture drew to her what she unconsciously wanted: the same logic of blame. The same chapter also advises seeking trained counsel rather than relatives, and chapter 19 tells readers to act on what they fear. Murphy asks for prayer and action; The Secret asks mainly for the right thought.

What research says about picturing what you want

Neither book’s mechanism has support: no study shows that a thought, held with feeling, changes events outside your own behaviour. What research does show is narrower, and sometimes the opposite of what both books promise.

In four prospective studies, among them graduates looking for a job and students facing an exam, Gabriele Oettingen and Doris Mayer (2002) found that positive expectations predicted effort and success measured weeks to two years later, while positive fantasies, idealized pictures of the future, predicted the reverse. In four experiments, Kappes and Oettingen (2011) found that positive fantasies produced less energy, measured partly by blood pressure, than questioning, negative or neutral fantasies.

What helps is pairing the wish with the obstacle and a plan. A 2021 meta-analysis by Guoxia Wang, Yi Wang and Xiaosong Gai, pooling 24 effect sizes from 21 articles (15,907 participants) on mental contrasting with implementation intentions, found a small-to-moderate effect on reaching goals, g = 0.336, and about 0.24 once corrected for publication bias. Picturing the steps also matters: first-year students who, in the days before a midterm, pictured how they would study (a process simulation) studied more and got better grades than a control group, while picturing only the grade they wanted (an outcome simulation) did not help (Pham & Taylor, 1999).

What to keep from each, and what to drop

If you came to this page from one of the two books, here is the short version.

A version without the attraction claim, in the app

Dream Architect keeps the part both books share and research does not contradict: a short scene before sleep. It drops the promise. You picture one ordinary moment, name the first feeling (“As if it’s normal”, “Relief”, “Ease”, “Quiet confidence” or “Gratitude”), and in the Full flow choose “Tomorrow’s sign”, something ordinary to notice the next day.

The sign is not a test of whether the universe answered. It works like the “if” half of an if-then plan: deciding in advance what you will notice and when. Add what you will then do, and the plan is complete. In a 2006 meta-analysis of 94 independent tests, Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran found a medium-to-large effect of such plans on reaching goals (d = 0.65); a larger 2025 meta-analysis of 642 tests by Sheeran, Listrom and Gollwitzer reports d = 0.27 to 0.66 depending on whether the outcome was cognitive, affective or behavioural.

The next morning, the app asks: “Last night you relived this moment. This morning, did anything remind you of it?” “Not yet” is an answer too. That is the difference in one line: The Secret asks you to receive; the ritual asks you to notice, and then to act.

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