In this video I describe one way of organizing the many other motivations that we face: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Abraham Maslow proposed that motivations could be categorized and then those categories could be arranged into a hierarchy of importance, meaning that lower-order motivations needed to be met before dealing with higher-order needs. Maslow’s hierarchy begins with physiological needs, followed by security, a sense of belonging, self–esteem, and finally, self–actualization; a drive to reach one’s fullest potential. Next I consider criticisms of Maslow’s hierarchy and some behaviors that don’t strictly follow the progression of needs described.
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Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In previous videos I’ve talked about hunger motivation and sexual motivation and, believe it or not, there’s actually more to life than just food and sex. So in the next few videos we’re gonna start looking at other types of motivation. There’s many other types of motivations that can influence our behavior and this means we’re going to have to think about how we can organize these many motivations and this brings us to the work of Abraham Maslow.
Now Maslow is a humanistic psychologist who I mentioned in the unit on personality and who we’ll talk about again in the unit on therapy but in this video we’re going to focus on Maslow’s approach to thinking about how to organize motivations. Maslow thought that we could group motivations together into categories and then we could put those categories into a hierarchy. So this is often referred to as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and the basic idea is that certain categories of needs must be met first and then you can move on to the next category. So this is often illustrated in textbooks with a diagram like what I’ve drawn here; a triangle or pyramid with five segments to it and the idea is that you start at the base of the pyramid and you meet those needs, that category of needs, and then you move up to the next category in the hierarchy until eventually you reach the top of the pyramid.
So in Maslow’s pyramid here we start with physiological motivations; these are motivations for food, water, shelter, sex, and these are things that help to ensure our survival. These are our most basic needs; they help us to survive individually and they help ensure the survival of the species in the case of sexual gratification. And once we have our physiological needs being met, then we move up to the next category and this is a sense of security and safety. The idea here is once our physiological needs are being met, we want to ensure that they continue to be met in the future. So it’s not enough just to eat right now and say “ok, I’ve satisfied my hunger. I’m done with that physiological need”. Now I say “well, now I can start worrying about will I eat tomorrow? Will I eat next week?” and so now we’re in this next category of motivations.
Once we have a sense of security, we feel that our physiological needs will continue being met in the future, then Maslow thought we move to the need for belonging. This is a sense of connection with other people. So now we start thinking about our friends and family and our sense of community and how we can connect with others and get along with them and so we have this new category of motivations at this level. And once we have a community, we have friends and family that we can depend on, and who can depend on us, Maslow thought we moved to think more about our sense of self–esteem. How do we feel about our own behavior? Do we feel we’re living a good life? Maybe that we’re serving others appropriately? Are we doing things that we can be proud of?
And then once we reach, once we reach those motivations, we can move to the top of Maslow’s hierarchy which is what he called self–actualization. This is something I talked about in the personality unit. The basic idea of self-actualization is that it’s living up to one’s fullest potential, right? Being the best person that you can be. He thought we all have an innate drive towards this motivation, that we all want to make our way up to the top of this hierarchy.
So what should we make of Maslow’s hierarchy? Well, one of the first points is, I think it is a useful framework, right? There’s many motivations for many different types of behavior and we’re all facing all of these different motivations at once. So it makes sense to group things and try to categorize these motivations. So I think it’s useful to have a framework for doing that and I think there’s also an intuitive logic to Maslow’s hierarchy. And this is perhaps why it’s so popular is, it makes it pretty clear progression of the motivations that we face and and it makes sense, right? “Oh yeah, physical needs must come first. If you are starving to death, then you’re probably not too concerned about, you know, some other connection with your friends or something”. Maybe you’re going to worry about satisfying your physical needs and then you can worry about, you know, what other people think of you, right?
I think that makes sense; there’s an intuitive logic to it but the problem is that the progression is not clear-cut. And so it doesn’t really help us to see that maybe it’s not the case that you always need to take care of all of your physiological needs first. You know, we face many motivations at once and so maybe they’re not so neatly organized. And we also have the idea that our motivations often conflict with one another and Maslow’s hierarchy doesn’t really tell us how to deal with that. Or it doesn’t really show us what happens when you have conflicting motivations from different levels of the hierarchy. Is it always the case that you need to satisfy the lower order motivation? Or are there situations where people satisfy the higher order rather than lower order?
And so this brings us to examples of exceptions to this hierarchical structure. So we might think about somebody who’s on a hunger strike. Well, here they’re putting aside their physiological need for food in order to serve some higher purpose. Or somebody who takes a vow of abstinence is doing much the same thing. Or we could think about altruistic behavior where somebody puts their own safety in danger or their own physiological needs in order to help someone else; maybe a friend or a family member. In that case maybe they’re putting their sense of belonging, or maybe it’s even a stranger, just someone else in their community, and they’re putting that person first rather than their own physiological needs with their own safety.
And lastly we might think about situations where people are suffering in famine and a common thing that we see in in these situations is that people often share food with each other. They share food with friends and family and even with strangers and this is another case where people are putting aside their own physiological needs. So if you are starving and you have some small bit of food that you manage to find, of course you could certainly use all of it yourself. You could use all of those calories but rather than taking it all for yourself what we often see is in famine situations people still share food. They still divide whatever meager amount of food they have amongst their community and this again violates this strict hierarchy that we might get the impression that Maslow was promoting with this hierarchy of needs.
But I should end by being fair to Maslow that, of course, he recognized the complexity of thinking about all the different motivations that influence us. And so I don’t think it’s fair to say that “well, he thought this simplistically about motivation”. I don’t think that’s the case. It’s also true that he suggested later in his career that perhaps there was an even higher level in his hierarchy, and a level beyond self-actualization which he called transcendence. This is the idea that it’s not even about you anymore, it’s about some even higher purpose to your life; a sense of meaning that goes beyond just your individual or your individual potential. Ok, so that’s the basic idea of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!
