The Hierarchy of Needs, postulated by Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation”, is easily one of the most prominent models in Western literature regarding factors which motivate human behavior. It is ascribed to by many sectors; to include marketing, management, and public relations. As a tool for evaluating motivations it can be useful, but it has certain limitations.
The Basics
Abraham Maslow, a prominent WWII era psychologist, developed the Hierarchy from research on people he considered to be of higher status in life. He proposed that, because most psychological data of his time was obtained as a result of studying mentally sick people, a complete model must have an ideal form as its foundation. This Platonic view created some inconsistencies in the bulk of his theory, but it allowed him to gather data regarding the make-up of people psychiatrists would normally consider being well-balanced and successful.
From the data Maslow collected, he determined there exists a specific set of motivating needs. He then decided the set of needs exist in a hierarchical fashion. There are many models which include anywhere from three to eight categories of needs, but the standard model presented in the aforementioned paper includes five categories which fall into two groups, existence or growth needs, and often displayed graphically as a pyramid.
The Hierarchy
Existence needs make up the bottom three hierarchies of the pyramid and include all things which a human requires just to survive. In the standard model, they are, from the base, physiological needs, safety needs, and social (belonging) needs.
Physiological needs are all of the basic necessities to live: food, water, air, shelter, reproductive activity, and homeostasis (stability of an organism’s internal environment). Maslow viewed these needs as the base requirement: a primal level which only people of some mental inadequacy or subject to dire situations live in.
Safety needs are those which provide a person with some sort of stability in the external environment. It can include basic physical security measures such as defense and locked doors, but also refers to less tangible considerations like financial security, insurance, justice, and good health.
Social needs, also referred to interchangeably as love or belonging needs, encompass the desire of a person to be a part of some social group. While social needs could conceivably fall under growth needs, they are included in existence because society is considered to be a necessity in the survival of the human species. This category includes strong social ties, such as friendship or intimacy, and looser ties like being part of a club or having friendly coworkers.
The top two categories are referred to in Maslow’s hierarchy as growth needs. The term growth does not suggest physical growth, but rather cognitive, self-awareness, and emotional growth. It is the invisible line between existence needs and growth needs which many people would propose separates humans from other species, or even modern society from primitive cultures. In the basic model, the top two categories are esteem and self-actualization needs.
Esteem needs constitute all factors necessary for a person to realize their individual presence and for others to recognize that presence. Self-worth, self -esteem, and respect are all aspects of esteem needs. To Maslow, there is a sort of sub-hierarchy here where the esteem needs dependent on the views of others are lower than those which are internally developed.
Self-actualization refers to the desire of a person to rise to their full potential. Maslow described it as “. . . the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.” The use by Maslow of the word “desire” here is prominent: he determined that everything below self-actualization was a need, with people who have risen to the ability to focus on self-actualization being “basically satisfied” and all subsequent efforts being based on desire rather than need per se. He suggested that people of this station are so rare that inadequate evidence exists to fully define them, but proposed that an advanced sense of humor, creativity, and acceptance of the self are among the indicators of a basically satisfied and self-actualizing person.
The Mechanics
Up to this point, the categories of needs alone do not offer much in the explanation of motivation, but instead simply indicate areas of mental health where a person may be lacking. To make his theory work as a tool for determining roots of motivation and behavior, Maslow determined certain functional elements behind the needs.
First are the deficit and progression principles. The deficit principle states that a need left unsatisfied becomes a motivator, pushing the person toward satisfying the need, and once satisfied the need ceases to motivate. Essentially, a person bereft of food is motivated to get food: once full and certain the next meal will come, that person will stop being motivated by hunger. Once a need has been satisfied, the person will then move on to another higher-order need, constituting the progression principle.
As is suggested by the title of this theory, Maslow asserted the needs, in most cases, exist in a hierarchy: meaning that in order for a given category of needs to be addressed all lower needs must first be satisfied. Thus, returning to our hungry person, in order for this person to be concerned at all with providing for their defense they must first obtain food. So the motivation is found in the deficit principle, continual motivation is addressed by the progression principle, and upward mental mobility is directed by the hierarchy.
Inherent Problems
Even Maslow recognized the most obvious problem as discussed thus far: there are some people who seem to be able to ignore lower-level needs in the pursuit of higher-level ones. Examples include ascetics who shun food and society in an effort to become something spiritually greater, the “starving artists” who will continue their creativity despite being penniless, and martyrs who will sacrifice everything in devotion to a cause.
To Maslow, people who actually reversed the order of needs or seemed to skip certain hierarchies were oddities. He postulated that, in most cases, people who seem to have skipped hierarchies have simply learned to ignore the lower level needs with discipline (an attribute of self-actualization) or have somehow forgotten that they should be concerned with some needs.
Such explanations, and indeed the entire theory, were not based on empirical data collected from a wide sample of people and cultures, so many other theorists subsequently altered or completely revamped Maslow’s theories. Included in this group are Clayton Alderfer (ERG theory), David McClelland (Acquired Needs theory), and Frederick Herzberg (Two-factor theory). The common thread between these theorists is they all simplified Maslow’s work, with Alderfer and McClelland keeping only three categories of needs and Herzberg making due with just two. Such simplification allowed them to address wider samples of people and ensure cross-cultural application.
Theoretic difficulties aside, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs certainly encouraged further research and development of working motivation-based behavior models. Such examination of individual behavior has become central to many aspects of human life. Using these models, leaders are better equipped to meet the needs of their subordinates and counselors are able to develop tools for diagnosing and treating various psychological disorders.
References:
Abraham H. Maslow, “A Theory of Human Motivation”, originally published in Psychological Review, 50, 370-396; 1943.
