Putting "The Secret" to the test

rcronk

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I have a few relatives that believe that "The Secret" (Law of attraction) works. I don't think it works. So, all parties involved in the debate are currently heavily biased.

So what I'd like to do is come up with a simple unbiased scientific test for them to try to see if it works or not. I'll explain the test below and I'd like some feedback about my proposed test so I can make sure I'm not missing anything. I'd also like to be able to explain why "The Secret" seems to work because of confirmation bias and I need some help with those terms and definitions in the context of "The Secret".

The test
I will generate with a pseudo-random number generator (because I'm a software engineer geek) a list of 30 pseudo-random values before the test begins. Each value will be either "Positive" or "Negative/Neutral". Each value represents one day (or other unit of time agreed upon) and the test subject will think positively on each day that has a "Positive" next to it, and will either not think about it or think negatively about it on each day that has a "Negative/Neutral" next to it. Each day, the level of success will be recorded. Success must be measured objectively (e.g. amount of money made/lost, number of free bicycles that appear, etc.). The Success or Failure must not be affected directly or indirectly by the test subject (e.g. consciously or subconsciously working harder to market an Internet product on the positive days than they do on the negative days and then counting income from those sales as their success/failure) - it has to be something that is not related to the test subject. At the end of 30 days (or 30 hours, or whatever), I will average the positive and negative days' success/failure results and calculate the standard deviation and see if there's a statistically significant difference between positive thinking and negative thinking days.

Help
1. Did I miss anything in the process or requirements? I wrote them in paragraph form - is there a more scientific form of writing it to make it more easily expressed in a standard way?

2. Is calculating the mean and standard deviation all that would be required to analyze the result and derive a conclusion from it? Do I need to calculate the standard error? Help me out on the statistical requirements needed to show significant difference or not.

3. Confirmation bias is when a person more easily accepts things that match their existing beliefs while being skeptic of (or ignoring) things that don't match their preexisting beliefs, right? This would apply to people who already believe in "The Secret". There's also the issue of remembering the days it worked well and forgetting the days it didn't. Is that behavior also called confirmation bias or does that have a different name?

4. Any other help in setting up and executing the test or explaining the results of the test and why people seem to think it works when it really doesn't would be appreciated. In fact, it would be nice to have them give me a subjective answer to whether they thought "The Secret" worked during those 30 days at the end of it and compare that subjective answer to the objective data and then use the confirmation bias and other explanations to explain the discrepancy.

Thanks in advance for all of your input. In fact, if we could get this test nailed down, we could then have "believers" and "skeptics" run the test whether they be members of the forum (skeptics) or friends of members of the forum (believers) to run the test and post their results.
 
One problem I foresee: if believers in The Secret take your test, and don't see results, they'll say, "it would have happened, but the test wasn't long enough." Or "maybe I didn't get what I was wishing for, but maybe there's something even better that my positive thoughts are going to get me--maybe something down the line. Or maybe I would have got hit by a car, but didn't as a result of positive thinking."

Etc. My experience is that people who believe in this kind of stuff want to believe, regardless of evidence. I would be curious to hear what the author says though, about how long it should take to get what you wish for, and if there's any way to test this. Or what evidence she has that it really works. And why she was able to reveal the secret when so many others for kept it secret for centuries.

I'd be curious though, to see what your relatives say about taking a test like this. Have you asked them yet?
 
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I think the test length and measurements can be figured out beforehand and adjusted if necessary. I'm really not looking to change any true believers' minds. I agree that they most likely won't be swayed. I would like to affect fence sitters though, and a side effect would be that it would get them to put up or shut up - run the test and show me the money, or let's talk about politics or something useful instead of "The Secret".

I know of one relative who is a true believer who may not take the test, but I have another relative who is a fence sitter who has been receptive to some other skepticism and so I think he would be willing to run it and may even be swayed by the results. I think his belief is more of a general "karma" or "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" or "you reap what you sew"-style belief in "The Secret" though. I wanted to run it by the forum first and refine it and get it right before even asking them though.

Do you have any help or answers to my OP questions? Thanks!
 
rcronk I think you should take the test as well, along with everyone else.
 
The problem is that the book/DVD actually doesn't set them up to expect anything quite so stark as bicycles magically appearing, even though the video seems to show it happening; the words that the people in it say are different. They describe the process in a more subtle way, like Christians saying that the Lord works in mysterious ways.

For example, one guy's story is that he thought a lot about a certain house he saw in an aerial photograph in a magazine or some source like that. It represented financial success to him. But even according to "The Secret", he didn't just wake up in that house one day with it having magically become his. He worked on running his business for the following years, increased his wealth significantly, paid his bills regularly, and developed the kind of credit rating and account balances that enabled him to eventually sign a mortgage. By this time, he'd put the photograph away and forgotten about it, or at least its details, but the next time he took it out again, he realized that it was the view from above of exactly the same house he was now living in.

They know not to expect world-changing flashes of light to happen before their eyes and leave their manifested dreams immediately sitting in front of them. They know to expect the results to take unpredictable amounts of time and come from process which look mundane to the faithless, such as a man getting a fancy new house after several years of successful business management and responsible financial behavior. It's just that they'll look at those mundane processes and interpret them as being driven by some unseen mystical force in the background, or they'll look at the lack of success yet and say something's in the works to bring it along later. So disproving stark, instantaneous miracles won't affect them because it's disproving something they already don't think anyway.
 
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PS: Unless you follow a subject around all day judging whether it's positive or negative yourself, you have no source of that judgement other than what they say, and they already know whether they're supposed to think of positive or negative things, so they know what results they're supposed to get.
 
I have more faith in the test subjects than you do. They already have some claimed daily objective (monetary) results that should be easy to work with. And sure, I'll likely take the challenge too just for fun.So, can anyone help me with the questions in the OP? Thanks.
 
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rcronk said:
I have more faith in the test subjects that you do. They already have some claimed daily objective (monetary) results that should be easy to work with. And sure, I'll likely take the challenge too just for fun.So, can anyone help me with the questions in the OP? Thanks.
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If that's the case, you may want to keep it simple (and quantifiable) and just focus on the money aspect. Keep a financial diary for the "Positive" and "Neutral/Negative" dates and see if there is any correlation. Don't worry about magic bicycles or the like, just dollars and cents. For the financial diary, the more complete they can make it, the better. For example, if they do put X numbers of hours into marketing a product, have them record that as well as the dollars made. With any luck (ha ha!), they will see how what they had been attributing to "The Secret" can often be attributed to hard work and personal effort.

Hmm, thinking further on this, maybe have two variables and see how they correlate with income. Have one set of numbers generated for "The Secret" and another for "working your butt off". Both should be randomized so that there are days where you do one, the other, both, or neither. See which type of day fares best!
 
I'm going to put forth a theory that the "work your butt off" variable will win. Thanks for the ideas.

I really need help on the rest of the OP questions too. Any statistics wizards here?
 
Can you give some specific example of things your relatives point to as evidence that it works?

Can the effects be transferred - i.e. does it work if someone has positive thoughts for someone else? That would make it much easier to blind.

Linda
 
I watched the Secret years ago and thought.. hmmmm. Yet, here I am without my great wealth. lol.

Not too long after watching the movie, I was in a grocery store and had stepped into one of the dreaded lines that just weren't moving. There was a shorter line to my right with a gentleman that I could see was getting really irritated at having to wait in his equally slow line. With the movie still fresh in my mind, I found myself thinking about the Secret.

I thought, ok, I won't get any more ticked off than I am getting and just let it happen. I won't focus on the negative that is happening. (according to the Secret, that only helps bring forth the mojo) I actually felt calmer and even though my line must have had three or four more ppl in front of me, I still managed to get my few items while that poor angry guy was still waiting. He did manage a laugh when I said I beat him even with my longer line.

The Secret at work, or a better cashier..? That is my only brush with the Secret. I still can't manage my road rage.. why, oh why do slow people want to drive in front of me and why, oh why do fast people want to drive behind me?!?

:)
 
If there is no way of making the experiment blind, for example as suggested someone else thinks positive thoughts on behalf of the subject then I don't think you can really consider any of the results to be significant.
 
rcronk said:
Each value represents one day (or other unit of time agreed upon) and the test subject will think positively on each day that has a "Positive" next to it, and will either not think about it or think negatively about it on each day that has a "Negative/Neutral" next to it.
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If I were a believer, I would be too excited about the philosophy to not think about it for an entire day.
 
How about you just go find a bunch of homeless people, Junkies, people dying of Aids or people starving to death in a war torn nation then introduce them to the concepts of the secret, then keep track of them for a year to see if they find places to live and get jobs, kick their habits, not die or have the war end and food to be plentiful. Harsh reality will be the proof. ;)
 
The example I have from one potential test subject is that he sets up some marketing on the Internet - like click through ads - and then just leaves it alone for a while and lets it make some money. He said (to the true believer) that he had been thinking positively about it lately and he had made more money than before - "it's working". So, since he's not doing anything from day to day about it except thinking a certain way about it, the test should be blind enough. And since he's already doing it, the test is ready to go - the only thing missing is to sprinkle some random "neutral/negative" days in there and check the $$$ each day correlating it to the positive/negative day types.

So, again, please, can someone help me out with the questions in the OP? I just want to get the experiment set up correctly first and once we have it refined and laid out properly (with the help of all of you who can help me with the questions in the OP), then I'll take it to the test subjects and see what happens. I just need scientist-minded and statistic-minded persons to review my OP and give me some help, that's all.

I'll post the results here. In fact, I'm thinking about tracking a stock and thinking positively or negatively about that stock for 30 units of time and posting the results and doing the calculations here as a test run.

Again, thanks in advance for helping me with the questions in the OP.
 
rcronk said:
The example I have from one potential test subject is that he sets up some marketing on the Internet - like click through ads - and then just leaves it alone for a while and lets it make some money. He said (to the true believer) that he had been thinking positively about it lately and he had made more money than before - "it's working". So, since he's not doing anything from day to day about it except thinking a certain way about it, the test should be blind enough. And since he's already doing it, the test is ready to go - the only thing missing is to sprinkle some random "neutral/negative" days in there and check the $$$ each day correlating it to the positive/negative day types.
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What if "The Secret" has a lag time; e.g. positive thoughts today lead to positive results tomorrow. I think your suggested experiment is too flawed to produce useful results.
 
If I were a believer, I wouldn't find your experiment persuasive. If there were no differences between days I was supposed to think positive thoughts and days I wasn't, I would simply point out to you that even on neutral days positive thoughts entered my mind.

I think you would be better off setting it up like the prayer studies. You mentioned stocks. Pick a bunch of stocks, randomly assign believers to think positively about half of them, and then compare the performance of the two groups at the end of the week.

Linda
 
Ladewig said:
What if "The Secret" has a lag time; e.g. positive thoughts today lead to positive results tomorrow. I think your suggested experiment is too flawed to produce useful results.
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Is that the only flaw? If so, we can adjust the experiment. Bring solutions and suggestions to the table, not just problems. Could we have the test subject tell us what time period to use based on their past results that have worked?

fls said:
If I were a believer, I wouldn't find your experiment persuasive. If there were no differences between days I was supposed to think positive thoughts and days I wasn't, I would simply point out to you that even on neutral days positive thoughts entered my mind.

I think you would be better off setting it up like the prayer studies. You mentioned stocks. Pick a bunch of stocks, randomly assign believers to think positively about half of them, and then compare the performance of the two groups at the end of the week.

Linda
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As I said previously, this experiment isn't supposed to convince true believers. It's for fence sitters - I have a fence sitter relative who I think will take the test. He's been receptive to 9/11 debunking and other debunking before and he's pretty honest and willing to let go of false beliefs so this test is really tailored for him, but it might be useful in general too.

I will think about the stock idea you gave. I'll think positively about it. ;)

So, anybody want to help out on the statistical calculations, or any other of the questions in the OP?
 
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rcronk said:
As I said previously, this experiment isn't supposed to convince true believers. It's for fence sitters - I have a fence sitter relative who I think will take the test. He's been receptive to 9/11 debunking and other debunking before and he's pretty honest and willing to let go of false beliefs so this test is really tailored for him, but it might be useful in general too.
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Then there's no point in asking us the questions in the OP. Ask him to look at your design and tell you what would be persuasive to him. Come back to us once you have worked out the details.

I will think about the stock idea you gave. I'll think positively about it. ;)

So, anybody want to help out on the statistical calculations, or any other of the questions in the OP?
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Statistical calculations depend upon the experimental design. Once you have worked out the design with your relative, I would be willing to help.

Linda
 
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