Maslow's hierarchy of needs

What it says

Maslow's 1943 paper sets out five kinds of need and says they come forward in a rough order. A need that is not met takes over attention and action. Once it is reasonably well met it stops being a motive, and the next one is felt.

The five, from the bottom of the usual drawing up, are physiological needs, safety, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. Only the last is never finished. Maslow described it as becoming what a person is able to become.

He was more careful about the order than the pyramid is. He wrote that the levels overlap and that the ranking varies from person to person. A need does not have to be fully met before the next one appears. His later writing added needs above esteem, including the wish to know and to understand.

The five levels

From the bottom of the usual drawing to the top, with what Maslow meant by each one.

1. Physiological

   Air, water, food, sleep and warmth. A person short of these has very little attention left for anything else.

2. Safety

   Shelter, order, money that does not run out, a body out of danger, a world that behaves predictably.

3. Love and belonging

   Friends, family, a partner, a group that counts you as one of its own members.

4. Esteem

   Respect from other people, and the harder kind that comes from what you have actually done.

5. Self-actualization

   Using what you have: the work, the making or the growth one particular person is suited to.

Where it came from

The paper is A Theory of Human Motivation, published in Psychological Review in 1943, and the fuller account is the 1954 book Motivation and Personality. Maslow drew his picture of the top level from people he admired rather than from a sample.

The pyramid came later and from somewhere else. Bridgman, Cummings and Ballard traced it in 2019 to management writing of the 1960s, where a stack of five blocks made the idea easy to teach. Maslow set the needs out in prose and never drew it.

What holds up, and what does not

The needs themselves hold up well. Louis Tay and Ed Diener looked at survey answers from people in over a hundred countries in 2011. The same handful of needs predicted how people rated their lives nearly everywhere. The order did not hold. Getting something out of one kind of need did not depend on the one below it being filled.

The ranking is the part with thin evidence behind it. Mahmoud Wahba and Lawrence Bridwell reviewed the research in 1976. They found very little support for five distinct levels, or for the claim that one is satisfied before the next is felt. Fifty years later that is still the position. It is a useful list of what people need and a poor model of the order they need it in.

What it does not mean

It does not rank people, and it does not say anybody has to earn the top of a pyramid. Self-actualization in Maslow's sense is not an achievement or a personality type. It also does not forecast what one person will want next: the order varies, and the evidence for a fixed sequence is weak. Read it as a list of what a life needs rather than as a staircase.

Check yourself

Three questions on what is above. Each answer says why.

1. Pick the statement that describes what Maslow claimed about the order of needs.

   1. Each need has to be fully met before the next is felt
   2. Lower needs tend to take priority, with the levels overlapping
   3. The five needs come forward in a different order for everybody
   Show the answer

   Answer: B. Maslow wrote that the ranking is a tendency rather than a rule. The levels overlap, and one need does not have to be met in full before the next appears.

2. Where did the pyramid drawing come from?

   1. Maslow's 1943 paper in Psychological Review
   2. Management writing of the 1960s
   3. The 1954 book Motivation and Personality
   Show the answer

   Answer: B. Bridgman, Cummings and Ballard traced the pyramid to management writing in the 1960s. Maslow set the needs out in prose and never drew the stack.

3. What did the 1976 review by Wahba and Bridwell conclude?

   1. The five levels were confirmed, in order
   2. There was little support for a fixed order of needs
   3. The needs do not matter to motivation at all
   Show the answer

   Answer: B. They found very little evidence for five distinct levels, or for one need being satisfied before the next is felt. The needs themselves were not the problem.

Sources

1. Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4).
2. Maslow, A. H. (1954). Motivation and Personality. Harper and Row.
3. Wahba, M. A., and Bridwell, L. G. (1976). Maslow reconsidered: A review of research on the need hierarchy theory. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 15(2).
4. Tay, L., and Diener, E. (2011). Needs and subjective well-being around the world. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(2).
5. Bridgman, T., Cummings, S., and Ballard, J. (2019). Who built Maslow's pyramid? A study of the origins of management studies' most famous symbol. Academy of Management Learning and Education, 18(1).

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