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NYU Profs Attack Oprah Nation

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Set your intention!
Put it out there, and the universe will take care of the rest...
You can have anything you want that you first create as a possibility, and then enroll others in your having...
The Secret Law of Attraction...

Sound familiar? These are all variations on a foundational concept of popular psychology: That verbalizing a dream, i.e. sharing it with others, is the first step to making that dream come true. Hello Oprah, Landmark Forum, and Deepak Chopra's daughters' shiny new Web site Intent.com.

Not so fast say some buzzkill NYU psychologists. Apparently, talking the talk, makes us feel good, but doesn't much improve our execution. Worsens it, in fact. Seems once we've put our dream out there, we feel so good, that we don't feel the need to actually do any work. Hilarious. Depressing. Maybe not true.

As recounted by Newsweek's Wray Herbert, the profs. did a sort of bizarre experiment with law students, multiple choice questionnaires, and variously sized pictures of Supreme Court Justices. (To be published in the May edition of Psychological Science.) Now, we're not rigorously academic, but we wonder about using law students as representatives of humanity in general. (Ha!) More to the point, we suspect the whole experiment falls under the rubrik of "it's complicated." Verbalizing (or visulaizing) a dream, may indeed be just be one part of the goal realization process. Clearly, in certain situations, for certain people, it works famously. Perhaps for others, in the absence of any mechanism for accountability, it simply contributes to delusions of grandeur.

We reserve judgement, and look forward to the next study.... In the meantime, we plan to continue speaking up.