We should never have the desire to compose music or create mathematical systems, or to adorn our homes, or to be well dressed if our stomachs were empty most of the time, or if we were continually dying of thirst, or if we were continually threatened by an always impending catastrophe...
~Abraham Maslow [1]
Part 1: Maslow's Hierarchy
Although the eminent psychologist Abraham Maslow first developed his theory of human motivation in the 1940s, it remains highly relevant as we seek to understand the impact of the current environment on our lives today. [2] Maslow's ideas and the humanistic psychology movement that he influenced have been subject to criticism over the years, but I continue to find this body of knowledge a source of profound insight in my work as a coach with senior leaders. [3]
Maslow, born in Brooklyn in 1908 to Russian immigrant parents, had a deeply unhappy childhood, which he ascribed in part to being the only Jewish family in his neighborhood. But a happy marriage at age 20 and a brilliant academic career in psychology transformed him, and returning to New York to teach in 1937, Maslow was a charismatic and popular professor, known as "the Frank Sinatra of Brooklyn College." [4] A 33-year-old father of two, Maslow wasn't drafted for military service in World War II, but he was deeply affected by the country's efforts in the fight against Fascism, which led to an emotional experience as he observed a parade of soldiers:
As I watched, the tears ran down my face. I felt that we didn't understand--not Hitler, nor the Germans, nor Stalin, nor the Communists. We didn't understand any of them... It was at that moment that I realized that the rest of my life must be devoted to discovering a psychology for the peace table... I wanted to prove that human beings are capable of something grander than war and prejudice and hatred. [5]
The result was what Maslow called "a positive theory of human motivation," with an emphasis on what can be learned not from unwell people under the care of psychotherapists (the focus of most research at the time) but from healthy and high-functioning people. "The most important concerns of the greatest and finest people in human history must all be encompassed and explained." [6] Maslow's core concept was a "hierarchy of needs," organized according to their "prepotency" or their ability to command our attention and influence our behavior. This hierarchy begins with physiological needs, such as hunger, thirst and sleep:
Undoubtedly these physiological needs are the most prepotent of all needs. What this means specifically is that in the human being who is missing everything in life in an extreme fashion, it is most likely that the major motivation would be the physiological needs rather than any others. A person who is lacking food, safety, love, and esteem would most probably hunger for food more strongly than for anything else. [7]
But what happens to [a person's] desires when there is plenty of bread and when [their] belly is chronically filled? At once other (and higher) needs emerge and these, rather than physiological hungers, dominate the organism. And when these in turn are satisfied, again new (and still higher) needs emerge, and so on. This is what we mean by saying the basic human needs are organized into a hierarchy of relative prepotency. [8, emphasis original]
As indicated by the first passage above, the basic needs that emerge once physiological needs are met are the following:
- Safety: "Security; stability; dependency; protection; freedom from fear, from anxiety, and chaos; need for structure, order, law, limits; strength in the protector... [The safety needs] may serve as the almost exclusive organizers of behavior, and we may then fairly describe the whole organism as a safety-seeking mechanism." [9]
- Belongingness and Love: "If both the physiological and the safety needs are fairly well gratified, there will emerge the love and affection and belongingness needs, and the whole cycle already described will repeat itself with this new center. Now the person will feel keenly, as never before, the absence of friends, or a sweetheart...or children. [They] will hunger for affectionate relations with people in general... Now [they] will feel sharply the pangs of loneliness, of ostracism, of rejection, of friendlessness, of rootlessness." [10]
- Esteem: People "have a need or desire for a stable, firmly based, usually high evaluation of themselves, for self-respect, or self-esteem, and for the esteem of others. These needs may therefore be classified into two subsidiary sets. These are, first, the desire for strength, for achievement, for adequacy, for mastery and competence, for confidence in the face of the world, and for independence and freedom. Second, we have what we may call the desire for reputation or prestige (defining it as respect or esteem from other people), status, fame and glory, dominance, recognition, attention, importance, dignity or appreciation." [11]
- Self-Actualization: "Even if all these needs are satisfied, we may still often (if not always) expect that a new discontent and restlessness will soon develop, unless the individual is doing what [they], individually [are] fitted for... What a [person] can be, [they] must be. This need we may call self-actualization... This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one idiosyncratically is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming. The specific form that these needs will take will of course vary greatly from person to person." [12]
Often inaccurately displayed as a pyramid--an image never used by Maslow himself--the hierarchy of needs is better represented as a ladder, as discussed in a thought-provoking 2019 paper that reinforces the value of Maslow's work while rejecting its customary presentation:
The depiction of the [hierarchy of needs] as a pyramid, with horizontal lines demarcating the different levels, makes it difficult to imagine that people can be simultaneously striving to satisfy a number of different needs. When one is on a ladder, multiple rungs are occupied by the feet and hands, and other rungs may be leaned on as well. The ladder as thus described is far closer to Maslow’s original thinking. [13]
So although higher needs emerge as lower ones become fulfilled during the course of our growth and development, we're always working to address multiple sets of needs simultaneously on various "rungs" of the ladder, a point Maslow makes explicitly:
[It is a] false impression that a need must be satisfied 100 percent before the next need emerges. In actual fact, most members of our society who are normal are partially satisfied in all their basic needs and partially unsatisfied in all their basic needs at the same time. A more realistic description of the hierarchy would be in terms of decreasing percentages of satisfaction as we go up the hierarchy of prepotency. For instance, if I may assign arbitrary figures for the sake of illustration, it is as if the average citizen is satisfied perhaps 85 percent in [their] physiological needs, 70 percent in [their] safety needs, 50 percent in [their] love needs, 40 percent in [their] self-esteem needs, and 10 percent in [their] self-actualization needs. [14]
Part 2: Tumbling Down
Why does this matter? More specifically, why does it matter today? It matters because in the current environment many people aren't moving up the ladder, they're moving down, and I see a version of this in my coaching practice. Most of my clients are CEOs, and all of them are high-status professionals for whom work fulfills many different needs, which is also true for the vast majority of their employees. And from the perspective of my clients and their colleagues the current environment has created a profound sense of unease as needs that had been largely fulfilled long ago are now making themselves felt again, in some cases for the first time in years:
- People who were pursuing a degree of self-actualization through work feel that such an accomplishment is beyond their grasp as more pressing needs occupy their energy and attention.
- Feelings of esteem are eroded as businesses struggle and people feel less capable of achieving their professional goals, and sense their reputation or status suffering as a result.
- The relationships and sense of community that people enjoyed at work have frayed in the absence of in-person contact or as a consequence of relocations and layoffs. (I've coached more CEOs through layoffs in the past six months than I did in the past decade.)
- The ineffective response to the pandemic, as well as increased levels of political polarization and social unrest, have led to a diminished sense that the world is a secure or predictable place and undermined faith in collective institutions.
- A heightened awareness of the risks of infection and violence has left people feeling physically vulnerable, while also making it harder to achieve consistent sleep or exercise regularly.
To be clear, my clients are keenly aware of the privileges they enjoy that made it possible to move up Maslow's ladder in the first place. I feel this myself, as I've been able to move my coaching practice online and minimize my own risk of infection, when many people I know have had their businesses severely impacted or must expose themselves to potential infection in order to earn a living. But while acknowledging that others are suffering more deeply may help us put our own suffering in perspective, it doesn't make our suffering irrelevant. I'm certainly seeing a great deal of suffering in my practice, and Maslow highlighted one of its sources:
We tend to take for granted the blessings we already have, especially if we don't have to work or struggle for them. The food, the security, the love, the admiration, the freedom that have always been there, that have never been lacking or yearned for tends not only to be unnoticed but also even to be devalued or mocked or destroyed. This phenomenon of failing to count one's blessings is, of course, not realistic and can therefore be considered to be a form of pathology. In most instances it is cured very easily, simply by experiencing the appropriate deprivation or lack, e.g. pain, hunger, poverty, loneliness, rejection, injustice, etc. [15]
If a failure to appreciate our blessings is a form of pathology, a more realistic appraisal may well be a step toward psychological health--but that doesn't make it less painful, particularly when the the process of moving down the ladder is accompanied by a number of stressors, as Maslow acknowledges:
Living at the higher need level means greater biological efficiency, greater longevity, less disease, better sleep, appetite, etc... Higher need gratifications produce more desirable subjective results, i.e. more profound happiness, serenity, and richness of the inner life. Satisfaction of the safety needs produce at best a feeling of relief and relaxation...[and] a greater value is usually placed upon the higher need than upon the lower by people who have been gratified in both. [16]
So moving down the ladder to address gaps in needs that were previously addressed can have a substantial psychological and physiological impact. Life is harder, it's less fulfilling in the process, and there's a sharpened sense of loss for the higher needs that were once met or becoming fulfilled. Further, the changes we're experiencing at societal and global levels are eroding our individual ability to pursue basic needs effectively, no matter what our personal circumstances:
The actualization of a person's real potentialities is conditioned upon...all those factors now called "ecological," upon the "health" of the culture, or the lack of it, upon the world situation, etc. Growth toward self-actualization and full-humanness is made possible by a complex hierarchy of "good preconditions." These physical, chemical, biological, interpersonal, cultural conditions matter for the individual finally to the extent that they do or do not supply [them] with the basic human necessities and "rights" which permit [them] to become strong enough, and person enough, to take over [their] own fate. [17]
Part 3: Climbing Back Up
So what can we do? My previous posts in this series offer some suggestions: Seek out and create pockets of agency in which we can experience a greater sense of control. And heighten our awareness of our emotional state, take action to regulate our threat response, and accept the inevitable limits on our control (because those pockets will extend only so far.)
And Maslow himself offers another starting point: Gratitude. Counting--and truly appreciating--the blessings we enjoy but have so often taken for granted. A few years ago I wrote a "gratitude checklist" that begins as follows:
| I'm alive. | ☐ |
| I'm not in pain. | ☐ |
| I can think clearly. | ☐ |
| I can see, hear, and walk. | ☐ |
| I'm warm and well-nourished. | ☐ |
| I'm protected from the elements. | ☐ |
All of which relate to the very first rung of Maslow's ladder, our physiological needs. Being grateful for these things sounds absurdly easy, but it's actually quite difficult, and Maslow explains why: the blessings we enjoy tend "not only to be unnoticed but also even to be devalued or mocked or destroyed." They vanish from our consideration as we move up the ladder to focus on higher needs, and it feels beneath us somehow to be attending to them again. It is, in a word, humbling to be compelled to acknowledge that these needs matter.
Yet that is a path to gratitude, if we're willing to take it. And in this context being attuned to suffering--others' and our own--can play a meaningful role in helping us count--and appreciate--our blessings. Over the past few days I've been monitoring a wildfire in Napa and Sonoma Counties as it advanced on Santa Rosa, just 15 miles from the farm where I live. Knowing people are losing their homes so close to mine makes me realize more fully what it would mean to not be protected from the elements, to not be warm or well-nourished.
A colleague is suffering from mobility issues, and a family member is in the late stages of dementia, and they make me realize more fully what it would mean to not see, hear or walk, to not think clearly. I'm just emerging from six weeks of constant back pain, the result of an old injury and new stress, and I'm vividly aware of what it means to be in pain--and how truly thankful I am that this latest episode is ending. And having lost one of my best friends to an accident just before the pandemic descended on the U.S., I'm acutely aware of the value of life and grateful for my own, even--and especially--in the current environment.
So gratitude can be found even when we tumble down to the lowest rung of Maslow's ladder--but where do we go from there? The point of gratitude isn't to lower our aspirations (and Maslow would suggest that it's not possible to do so, as he believed that all of the needs described in his hierarchy had an instinctive basis.) How do we begin to climb back up? We must reach out to others.
Maslow notes that our physiological needs are inherently self-centered--we rely on others to help meet our needs for food, housing, or medical care, but the process of fulfilling them is focused on our individual experience of satiation, shelter, or health. But all our other needs can be fulfilled only by working in collaboration with others to help them meet their needs:
To some extent, the higher the need, the less selfish it must be. Hunger is highly egocentric; the only way to satisfy it is to satisfy oneself. But the search for love and respect necessarily involves other people. Moreover, it involves satisfaction for these other people. [18]
Our needs for safety are truly met only when those around us also feel safe. Our needs for belonging and love are fulfilled only by enabling others to feel that they belong, to feel that they are loved. Our needs for esteem are founded upon the reciprocal exchange of esteem with others. And our needs for self-actualization invariably involve helping others become their best selves.
The challenge is that when we've tumbled down a few rungs on the ladder we tend to feel vulnerable and self-protective, and that's understandable. We may need to steady ourselves and heal for a time before we're ready to reach out. But bear in mind that we'll climb back up again only in partnership with others--and sometimes we'll be in a position to offer help, and sometimes we'll need to ask for help ourselves. This will require connection. And vulnerability. And courage.
This post is the third in a series on coping in the current environment:
- Part 1: Pockets of Agency
- Part 2: Aggression, Panic, Paralysis, Denial
- Part 3: Tumbling Down Maslow's Hierarchy
- Part 4: Wounded Creatures
- Part 5: The Legitimacy of Loss
- Part 6: Risk Calculus and Social Norms
Footnotes
[1] Motivation and Personality, 2nd edition, page 24 (Abraham Maslow, 1970)
[2] Maslow first published "A Theory of Human Motivation" in the American Psychological Association's Psychological Review in 1943. This paper remained essentially intact as a foundational chapter in his first and most influential book, Motivation and Personality, not only in the 1st edition of 1954, but also in the 2nd edition of 1970, which was published shortly before Maslow's death. A revised 3rd edition was published in 1987, and it includes some worthwhile additions by psychologists James Fadiman, Robert Frager and Ruth Cox, but I consider the 2nd edition a more definitive presentation of Maslow's views, and the passages quoted above are from that volume.
[3] Humanistic psychology--and Maslow in particular--has been criticized for a lack of experimental data, a fault that Maslow himself acknowledged:
It is fair to say that this theory has been quite successful in a clinical, social and personological way, but not in a laboratory and experimental way. It has fitted very well with the personal experience of most people, and has often given them a structured theory that has helped them to have a better sense of their inner lives. It seems for most people to have a direct, personal, subjective plausibility. And yet it still lacks experimental verification and support. I have not yet been able to think of a good way to put it to the test in the laboratory. Part of the answer to this puzzle came from Douglas McGregor, who applied this theory of motivation to the industrial situation. Not only did he find it useful in ordering his data and his observations, but also these data served retroactively as a source of validation and verification for the theory. It is from this area, rather than the laboratory, that empirical support is now coming. [Motivation and Personality, 2nd edition, page xii. Maslow was a significant influence on McGregor, who was a professor of management at MIT and is best remembered today for his work on organizational culture.]
But Maslow makes a compelling counter-critique in "Problem Centering vs. Means Centering in Science," chapter 2 in the 2nd edition of Motivation and Personality:
By means centering I refer to the tendency to consider that the essence of science lies in its instruments, techniques, procedures, apparatus, and its methods rather than in its problems, questions, functions or goals... I do not wish to underplay method; I wish only to point out that even in science, means may easily be confused with ends... Means centering tends inevitably to bring into being a scientific orthodoxy... One main danger of scientific orthodoxy is that it tends to block the development of new techniques... Another, probably more important, danger of the orthodoxy fostered by means centering is that it tends to limit more and more the jurisdiction of science. Not only does it block the development of new techniques; it also tends to block the asking of many questions, on grounds that...such questions cannot be answered by currently available techniques... Means-centered orthodoxy encourages scientists to be "safe and sound" rather than bold and daring. It makes the normal business of the scientist seem to be moving ahead inch by inch on the well-laid-out road rather than cutting new paths through the unknown. It forces conservative rather than radical approaches to the not-yet-known. [pages 11-17]
I don't mean to suggest that humanistic concepts should be always be taken at face value. In its later stages in the 1960s and '70s the movement seemed to spawn a number of grandiose, even absurd ideas that are impossible to prove or disprove, defying any sort of scientific analysis. But as an executive coach I value Maslow's willingness to address complex, thorny, meaningful questions because his answers, provisional though they might be, offer me and my clients a rich set of ideas to explore in our efforts to solve real-world problems. In contrast, much contemporary research, although methodologically sound, does not. As Maslow added, "The journals of science are full of instances that illustrate the point, that what is not worth doing, is not worth doing well." [page 18]
[4] "The Influence of Abraham Maslow" (Robert Frager), Foreward to Motivation and Personality, 3rd edition, page xxxvii (Abraham Maslow, et al, 1987). Although Frank Sinatra is remembered today as an elder statesman performing jazz classics, in the mid-1940s he was a 30-year old pop idol whose appeal to teenagers was unprecedented.
[5] Ibid, page xxxviii.
[6] Motivation and Personality, 2nd edition, page 33 (Abraham Maslow, 1970)
[7] Ibid, pages 36-37.
[8] Ibid, page 38.
[9] Ibid, page 39.
[10] Ibid, page 43.
[11] Ibid, page 45.
[12] Ibid, page 46.
[13] Who built Maslow’s pyramid? A history of the creation of management studies’ most famous symbol and its implications for management education, page 91 (Todd Bridgman, Stephen Cummings, John Ballard, Academy of Management Learning and Education, 2019). (Note that I'm precluded by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) from linking directly to a freely-available version of this paper, but you can search for it on the Victoria University of Wellington's open access repository, which is located outside the U.S. and not subject to the DMCA.)
I highly recommend this informative and insightful paper to anyone with an interest in the history of psychology or management education. Bridgman, Cummings and Ballard show that the pyramid was applied to Maslow's hierarchy of needs many years after his initial paper in a now-forgotten business school textbook and a business-oriented magazine, whose most lasting contributions may have been this inaccurate metaphor.
They also argue convincingly that the use of the pyramid creates several problems: It suggests that people must fully satisfy needs at one level before moving to a higher level, and that satisfied needs are no longer motivational. This idea is rooted in the work of Douglas McGregor, who played an instrumental role in promoting Maslow's theory, but Maslow himself disagreed, as noted above. The pyramid is also often employed to illustrate a universal human hierarchy of needs that transcends culture, although Maslow claimed merely that it was "more universal" than alternative models and noted that culture plays an essential role in the process of translating needs into behavior.
The pyramid can also be used to bolster an elitist and exclusionary view of organizational life, with higher needs being viewed as the purview of senior management and beyond the grasp of ordinary employees, a theme that emerges in much of the management literature of the mid-20th century. The highly egalitarian Maslow did not associate self-actualization with material success, but he did view it as an exalted state, attainable only with great effort by those rare few who are fully committed to their growth and development. [See Chapter 11 in Motivation and Personality, 2nd edition.]
And the pyramid's vividness as a metaphor seems to have amplified the impact of Maslow's theory well beyond what would seem to be justified by any research, which Maslow himself acknowledged. In summary, the authors conclude, "Maslow did not say that the [hierarchy of needs] is unidirectional, that achieving higher levels makes you a superior being, that once a need is satisfied it no longer affects behavior, or that it applies to all people in the same way."
[14] Motivation and Personality, 2nd edition, page 54 (Abraham Maslow, 1970)
[15] Ibid, page 61.
[16] Ibid, pages 98-99
[17] Ibid, page xxv
[18] Ibid, pages 99-100
For Further Reading
Gualala (On Mortality and Gratitude)
Not Every End Is a Goal (On Midlife Malaise)
How We Connect (and Why We Might Not).
Brené Brown, Vulnerability, Empathy and Leadership
Photo by US Army Africa.
