Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

Jacob Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a theory in psychology, proposed by Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation. Maslow studied exemplary people such as Albert Einstein, Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Frederick Douglass rather than mentally ill or neurotic people, writing that "the study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy.

This diagram shows Maslow's hierarchy of needs, represented as a pyramid with the more primitive needs at the bottom. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is often depicted as a pyramid consisting of five levels: the four lower levels are grouped together as being associated with Physiological needs, while the top level is termed growth needs associated with psychological needs. Deficiency needs must be met first. Once these are met, seeking to satisfy growth needs drives personal growth. The higher needs in this hierarchy only come into focus when the lower needs in the pyramid are satisfied. Once an individual has moved upwards to the next level, needs in the lower level will no longer be prioritized. If a lower set of needs is no longer being met, the individual will temporarily re-prioritize those needs by focusing attention on the unfulfilled needs, but will not permanently regress to the lower level. For instance, a businessman at the esteem level who is diagnosed with cancer will spend a great deal of time concentrating on his health (physiological needs), but will continue to value his work performance (esteem needs) and will likely return to work during periods of remission.

Deficiency needs
The first four layers of the pyramid are what Maslow called "deficiency needs" or "D-needs": if they are not met, the body gives no indication of it physically, but the individual feels anxious and tense. The deficiency needs are: survival needs, safety and security, love and belonging, and esteem.

Physiological needs
These are the basic human needs for such things as food, warmth, water, and other bodily needs. If a person is hungry or thirsty or their body is chemically unbalanced, all of their energies turn toward remedying these deficiencies and other needs remain inactive. Maslow explains that, "Anyone who attempts to make an emergency picture into a typical one and who will measure all of man's goals and desires by his[her] behavior during extreme physiological deprivation, is certainly blind to many things. It is quite true that man lives by bread alone — when there is no bread".

The physiological needs of the organism take first precedence. These consist mainly of (in order of importance):

• Breathing
• Drinking
• Eating
• Excretion

If some needs are not fulfilled, a person's physiological needs take the highest priority. Physiological needs can control thoughts and behaviors and can cause people to feel sickness, pain and discomfort.

Safety needs
With their physical needs relatively satisfied, the individual's safety needs take over and dominate their behavior. These needs have to do with people's yearning for a predictable, orderly world in which injustice and inconsistency are under control, the familiar frequent and the unfamiliar rare. In the world of work, these safety needs manifest themselves in such things as a preference for job security, grievance procedures for protecting the individual from unilateral authority, savings accounts, insurance policies and the like.

For the most part physiological and safety needs are reasonably well satisfied in the first world. The obvious exceptions, of course, are people outside the mainstream — the poor and the disadvantaged. If frustration has not led to apathy and weakness, such people still struggle to satisfy the basic physiological and safety needs. They are primarily concerned with survival: obtaining adequate food, clothing, shelter, and seeking justice from the dominant societal groups.

Safety and Security needs include:

• Personal security from crime
• Financial security
• Health and well-being
• Safety net against accidents/illness and the adverse impacts

Social needs
After physiological and safety needs are fulfilled, the third layer of human needs is social. This psychological aspect of Maslow's hierarchy involves emotionally-based relationships in general, such as:

• friendship
• intimacy
• having a supportive and communicative family

Humans need to feel a sense of belonging and acceptance, whether it comes from a large social group, such as clubs, office culture, religious groups, professional organizations, sports teams, gangs, ("Safety in numbers") or small social connections (family members, intimate partners, mentors, close colleagues, confidants). They need to love and be loved (sexually and non-sexually) by others. In the absence of these elements, many people become susceptible to loneliness, social anxiety, and depression. This need for belonging can often overcome the physiological and security needs, depending on the strength of the peer pressure. e.g. an anorexic ignores the need to eat and the security of health for a feeling of control and belonging.

Esteem needs
All humans have a need to be respected, to have self-esteem, self-respect, and to respect others. People need to engage themselves to gain recognition and have an activity or activities that give the person a sense of contribution, to feel accepted and self-valued, be it in a profession or hobby. Imbalances at this level can result in low self-esteem, inferiority complexes. People with low self-esteem need respect from others. They may seek fame or glory, which again depends on others. However confidence, competence and achievement only need one person and everyone else is inconsequential to one's own success. It may be noted, however, that many people with low self-esteem will not be able to improve their view of themselves simply by receiving fame, respect, and glory externally, but must first accept themselves internally. Psychological imbalances such as depression can also prevent one from obtaining self-esteem on both levels.

Growth needs
Though the deficiency needs may be seen as "basic", and can be met and neutralized (i.e. they stop being motivators in one's life), self-actualization and transcendence are "being" or "growth needs" (also termed "B-needs"), i.e. they are enduring motivations or drivers of behavior.

Aesthetic needs
Based on Maslow's beliefs, it is stated in the hierarchy humans need beautiful imagery or something new and aesthetically pleasing to continue up towards Self-Actualization. Humans need to refresh themselves in the presence and beauty of nature while carefully absorbing and observing their surroundings to extract the beauty the world has to offer.

Self-actualization
Self-actualization is the instinctual need of humans to make the most of their abilities and to strive to be the best they can. Working toward fulfilling our potential, toward becoming all that we are capable of becoming.

In Maslow's scheme, the final stage of psychological development comes when the individual feels assured that their physiological, security, affiliation and affection, self-respect and recognition needs have been satisfied. As these become dormant, they become filled with a desire to realize all of their potential for being an effective, creative, mature human being. "What a man can be, he must be", is the way Maslow expresses it.

Maslow's need hierarchy is set forth as a general proposition and does not imply that everyone's needs follow the same rigid pattern. For some people, self-esteem seems to be a stronger motivation than love. Mussolini, for example, alienated his closest friends by undertaking reckless military adventures to achieve status as a conqueror. For some people, the need to create is often a stronger motivation than the need for food and safety. Thus, the artist living in poverty is a classic example of reversing the standard hierarchy of needs. Similarly, persons who have suffered hunger or some other deprivation for protracted periods may live happily for the rest of their lives if only they can get enough of what they lacked. In this case, the level of aspiration may have become permanently lowered and the higher-order, less pre-potent needs may never become active. There are also cases of people's martyring themselves for causes and suffering all kinds of deprivations, particularly in the physiological, safety, and sometimes social categories, to achieve their aims.

Maslow writes the following of self-actualizing people:

• They embrace the facts and realities of the world (including themselves) rather than denying or avoiding them.
• They are spontaneous in their ideas and actions.
• They are creative.
• They are interested in solving problems; this often includes the problems of others. Solving these problems is often a key focus in their lives.
• They feel a closeness to other people, and generally appreciate life.
• They have a system of morality that is fully internalized and independent of external authority.
• They have discernment and are able to view all things in an objective manner.

To further confound the problem of understanding motivation, Maslow points out that motives are not always conscious. In the average person, he believes, they are more often unconscious than conscious — showing the influence on his thinking of Freudian psychologists who have long been concerned with the hidden causes of human behavior.

In Maslow's theory, then, human needs are arranged in a hierarchy of importance. Needs emerge only when higher-priority needs have been satisfied. By the same token, satisfied needs no longer influence behavior. This point seems worth stressing to managers and administrators, who often mistakenly assume that money and other tangible incentives are the only cures for morale and productivity problems. It may be, however, that the need to participate, to be recognized, to be creative, and to experience a sense of worth are better motivators in an affluent society, where many have already achieved an acceptable measure of freedom from hunger and threats to security and personal safety, and are now driven by higher-order psychological needs.

In short, self-actualization is reaching one's fullest potential. However, to further clarify “There are certain conditions which are immediate prerequisites for the basic need satisfactions.” Such conditions as freedom to speak, freedom to do what one wishes so long as no harm is done to others, freedom to express one's self, freedom to investigate and seek for information, freedom to defend one's self, justice, fairness, honesty, orderliness in the group are examples of such preconditions for basic need satisfactions.

According to Maslow, the tendencies of self-actualizing people are as follows:
1. Awareness
• efficient perception of reality
• freshness of appreciation
• peak experiences
• ethical awareness

2. Honesty
• philosophical sense of humor
• social interest
• deep interpersonal relationships
• democratic character structure

3. Freedom
• need for solitude
• autonomous, independent
• creativity, originality
• spontaneous

4. Trust
• problem centered
• acceptance of self, others, nature
• resistance to enculturation - identity with humanity

Maslow discovered that healthy individuals are motivated toward what he termed self-actualization, and noted that Self-actualizing people had strikingly similar characteristics. He described self-actualization as:

“an episode or spurt in which the powers of the person come together in a particularly and intensely enjoyable way and in which they are more integrated and less split, more open for experience, more idiosyncratic, more perfectly expressive or spontaneous, or fully functioning, more creative, more humorous, more ego-transcending, more independent of their lower needs, etc. They become in these episodes more truly themselves, more perfectly actualizing their potentialities, closer to the core of their being, more fully human. Not only are these their happiest and most thrilling moments but they are also moments of greatest maturity, individuation, fulfillment - in a word, their healthiest moments.”

Self-actualizing people, those who have come to a high level of maturation, health and self-fulfillment, have so much to teach us that sometimes they seem almost like a different breed of human being.