The inner life
Positive Thinking
Direct answer
Positive Thinking: Positive thinking is the deliberate habit of expecting good outcomes and dwelling on hopeful thoughts, made a household phrase by Norman Vincent Peale's book of 1952.
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At a glance
- Also called
- norman vincent peale, think positive
- Found in
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Related
- New Thought, Mental Contrasting, Affirmation, Law of Attraction
Positive thinking is the deliberate habit of expecting good outcomes and dwelling on hopeful thoughts, made a household phrase by Norman Vincent Peale's book of 1952.
A plain educational schematic; it does not diagnose a condition or replace professional care.
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What is positive thinking?
Positive thinking, as a method, tells a person to fill the mind with confident thoughts, to picture success and to refuse thoughts of defeat. Peale joined this to prayer and Bible verses repeated through the day. In the wider self-help trade the religious part fell away and the phrase came to mean a cheerful outlook cultivated on purpose.
Research separates several things the phrase runs together. Optimism as a trait, the general expectation that things turn out well, goes with persistence and better health in many studies. Pleasant fantasies about a particular goal are another matter: Gabriele Oettingen found that they predict less effort and worse results. And pressing cheerfulness on people in real trouble can leave them feeling blamed for it.
On the tree of the hidden arts: Imagination and intention.
What sets Positive Thinking apart
Peale's version has a texture the generic phrase has lost. It is a pastor's regimen: a verse such as 'I can do all things through Christ' said ten times a day, a mind emptied of worry twice daily, and success pictured and prayed over. His critics at the time fastened on what it left out, namely sin, tragedy and limits. The research that came later drew the line somewhere else, between expecting well in general, which helps people persist, and enjoying a success in fantasy, which saps the effort to reach it.
- Book: The Power of Positive Thinking, Norman Vincent Peale, 1952
- Author's pulpit: Marble Collegiate Church, New York, 1932 to 1984
- Bestseller run: 186 weeks on the New York Times list
- Trait research: dispositional optimism, measured by Scheier and Carver from 1985
- Counter-finding: Oettingen: positive fantasies predict lower effort
- Critique: Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided, 2009
Often mistaken for something else: Learned optimism, Martin Seligman's term of 1990, trains a person to dispute gloomy explanations of setbacks with evidence; positive thinking replaces the gloomy thought with a bright one and asks for no evidence.
The story behind Positive Thinking
The idea descends from New Thought, which William James described in 1902 as the religion of healthy-mindedness. Norman Vincent Peale, minister of Marble Collegiate Church in New York, published The Power of Positive Thinking in 1952; it stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 186 weeks. Psychiatrists and theologians of the day criticised it as a form of self-hypnosis. Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided (2009) renewed the criticism for a later generation.
Why Positive Thinking matters
Positive Thinking is the everyday form of the manifestation idea, and the research on it shows which kind of hope helps and which kind hinders.
How to read Positive Thinking
Readers keep the useful part by pairing a hopeful expectation with a plain look at the obstacle and a plan for meeting it.
Positive Thinking in practice: an example
Before an examination, hope steadies a reader; picturing the pass and skipping the revision is where positive thinking turns against them.
Where readings of Positive Thinking go wrong
A hopeful mood is not a treatment, and nobody is to blame for illness or loss because they failed to think brightly.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Aliases
- power of positive thinking, positive thinking meaning, norman vincent peale, think positive, does positive thinking work
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
What is positive thinking?
It is the practice of deliberately holding hopeful, confident thoughts and expecting good results. The phrase became common through Norman Vincent Peale's 1952 book The Power of Positive Thinking.
Does positive thinking work?
A generally optimistic outlook goes with persistence and good health in many studies. Daydreaming about a specific success, without planning for the obstacles, tends to reduce effort and results.
