I've written before about the Hierarchy of Needs, a influential theory developed by the eminent 20th century psychologist Abraham Maslow. [1] According to this framework, human needs are ordered by 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. [2]
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. [3, emphasis original]
As indicated by the first passage above, the 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." [4]
- 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." [5]
- 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. [6]
- 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. [7]
Often inaccurately displayed as a pyramid--a figure never used by Maslow himself--the hierarchy of needs is better represented as a ladder, which evokes the image of hands and feet on multiple rungs simultaneously. [8] Yet while we can envision and pursue higher needs when lower needs aren't entirely fulfilled, this becomes difficult if not impossible when lower needs go unmet. There's an easy way to demonstrate this:
Hold your breath, for as long as you can, while timing yourself.
I just did and lasted 1 minute and 15 seconds. I haven't tried that since I was a kid in a swimming pool somewhere, and as I began I truly intended to give it my best effort--in part, of course, because some vestigial, childish part of me thought it would be "impressive," although who I was trying to impress is unclear. I was determined to hit the 1-minute mark, which was a little challenging, and once I did I thought momentarily of shooting for 2:00--but within seconds I realized that was going to be impossible. At 1:10 I had abandoned all pretense of appearing "impressive" and was just thinking about the breath I finally took 5 seconds later, to my immense relief.
And that is Maslow's hierarchy in action. When my physiological need for oxygen was being fully met, it was easy to think about higher-order social and symbolic needs. Even as my oxygen supply was being depleted, I still gave some thought to those higher needs, striving to hold out a little longer. But eventually the "prepotency" of my most fundamental need exerted itself and took control--thankfully.
Why engage in this trivial exercise? Because it vividly illustrates some aspects of Maslow's theory that have significant implications for our lives in the real world:
Our needs aren't mutually exclusive, nor do we pursue them in a fixed sequence. The need for safety doesn't emerge only after all of our physiological needs are met, and higher needs don't emerge only when we're completely secure. As lower needs are met more fully, we can climb further up the ladder, but we're usually reaching for higher rungs no matter where we stand.
Yet we rapidly descend the ladder when fundamental needs go unmet. Holding your breath to induce hypoxia may seem silly, and few people reading this will experience persistent hunger. But some of us will experience chronic pain--I have myself, several times. [9] Others will struggle with insomnia, an issue that comes up regularly in my practice. And still others will feel profoundly unsafe, even imperiled. On these occasions it's essential to reestablish a firm footing before we begin climbing again.
But we will continue to strive upwards, which is a function of evolutionary psychology. Lower needs lose their power as motivators and eventually disappear from consciousness when they're fully met. (If you actually tried holding your breath earlier, you probably felt a surge of gratitude when that first wave of oxygen hit your lungs. What a pleasure it was to breathe! How long did that last?) This dynamic bears a close relationship with a concept known as hedonic adaptation: We adapt to changed conditions more readily than we anticipate, and we tend to take any improvements for granted. [10]
This is a feature for the species that often feels like a bug in our individual lives. Once our physiological and safety needs are sufficiently fulfilled, we re-organize our lives around the need for belonging. With sufficient social connection, we focus on obtaining self-esteem and the regard of others within that community. It's readily apparent why evolution has solved for these needs, in this order, and why this benefits the species while often leaving us feeling unfulfilled or inadequate in some way. (Evolution has never cared much about our peace of mind.)
The concept of self-actualization--the final rung on Maslow's ladder--doesn't fit so neatly into this schema, and its purpose seems to transcend such utilitarian calculus. It's clear that whole, secure people who live in connection with others and enjoy their esteem will be more biologically successful than those who lack similar advantages. But it's not at all clear what evolutionary advantage is conferred through self-actualization, what purpose is served by "becoming everything that one is capable of becoming." Perhaps that's the question that Maslow is asking us each to answer.
Footnotes
[1] For more on my thinking on Maslow and his work, see the following:
- Tumbling Down Maslow's Hierarchy
- Hard Problems in Soft Cultures
- Organizational Development: Is Humanism Overrated?
[2] Motivation and Personality, 2nd edition, pages 36-37 (Abraham Maslow, 1970)
[3] Ibid, page 38.
[4] Ibid, page 39.
[5] Ibid, page 43.
[6] Ibid, page 45.
[7] Ibid, page 46.
[8] 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). 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.
[9] On Pain and Hope
[10] For more on hedonic adaptation, see the following:
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The Myths of Happiness: What Should Make You Happy, but Doesn't, What Shouldn't Make You Happy, but Does, page 120 (Sonja Lyubomirsky, 2014)
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The How of Happiness, pages 48-51 (Sonja Lyubomirsky, 2007)
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Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative? (Philip Brickman, Dan Coates and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1978)
Photo by Jerry Crowley.
