Indeed, Maslow never drew anything like that. The psychologist Scott Bary Kaufman debunks this myth more thoroughly in his 2019 write-up here[1]. (Aside: Kaufman updates Maslow's "hierarchy" idea with a "sailboat" metaphor[2].)
Maslow always emphasized the relative satisfaction of needs. To quote from his famous paper[3]:
[quote]
... As for the concept of emergence of a new need after satisfaction of the prepotent [i.e. dominant] need, this emergence is not a sudden, saltatory phenomenon but rather a gradual emergence by slow degrees from nothingness. For instance, if prepotent need A is satisfied only 10 per cent then need B may not be visible at all. However, as this need A becomes satisfied 25 per cent, need B may emerge 5 per cent, as need A becomes satisfied 75 per cent need B may emerge 90 per cent, and so on.
[/quote]
If you want to understand Maslow, there's no escaping his two seminal books:
• Motivation and Personality, 1954
• Toward a Psychology of Being, 1962
He writes with superb clarity, and is an absolute joy to read. If you're really, really short on time, at least read his paper, A Theory of Human Motivation[3].
If you like reading fiction, anyway. Like many of the works of this time, all of it is smart sounding writing, none of it has anything to do with scientific knowledge.
Yeah, I gave up halfway through Toward a Psychology of Being because it felt more like wishful thinking about what could possibly happen in the future in this field, with a touch of esotericism, rather than actual well-founded insights.
I hear you. Maslow does make some leaps and he often points out it when he's making. He was acutely self-aware. I disagree with several of his arguments, which are quite outdated now. But he made many valuable observations that are still relevant.
He's is still the 9th most cited psychologist. That wouldn't happen if it's all "fiction".
The pyramid implies (to me, at least) that the lower layers are absolutely necessary for the next layer up. It appears that Maslow himself wasn't so absolute about it, and referred to the degree with which lower-level needs were fulfilled.
It is arguable that the "absolute" interpretation is not fundamental to either the pyramid or the hierarchy. It's still probably a good first order approximation to get the point across: you're gonna have trouble with upper layers if you have any serious deficiencies in lower layers.
They are absolutely NOT necessary. Otherwise a monk with perfect self-actualization would lose all that when their monastery burns down. I’m fairly confident that isn’t the case. Instead shelter becomes a dominant motivator, but they still self-actualize just fine.
Not that I read in that string of tweets. The closest I saw was the assertion that managers used Maslow's hierarchy as a way to justify increasing morale without pay raises.
Which doesn't seem like it relates to the shape of the diagram (or any other representation of the hierarchy) at all.
If managers are doing things higher on the hierarchy but employees want higher wages, that just means they're further down the hierarchy and that need hasn't yet been fulfilled.
It has more to do with the idea that authorities will decide what they want to do then recruit words from anywhere they can find to justify it, than it has to do with what those words say. (See also: Crusaders using Jesus as a rallying symbol for mass killings of civilians, 1920s American eugenicists using the science of heredity to justify racism followed by 1930s Nazis who developed on the theme, 1980s Regan administration selectively using basic economic ideas to dismantle public welfare, while staying silent about corporate welfare.)
It is limited to authorities in the history books because by definition when non-authorities do it, it doesn't go very far. :-) No matter how much a medieval peasant hates the Franks, nobody will ever know.
Agreed. I was preparing to be told I've been bamboozled about Maslov. Fortunately the critique was limited to (a) non-authentic visualization of a hierarchy and (b) someone has misused a theory.
The pyramid does confuse and muddy the waters a lot. Scott Kaufman's post[1] on his "sailboat" metaphor unpacks the problem well:
The familiar pyramid shape suggests that once we complete each step, we’re done dealing with that need forever. As if life were a video game, and once we complete each level, we unlock the next, with no looking back. It’s an appealing concept. It’s also a gross misrepresentation of the humanistic vision that propelled Maslow’s work.
Maslow emphasized that we are always in a state of becoming and that one’s “inner core” consists merely of “potentialities, not final actualizations” that are “weak, subtle, and delicate, very easily drowned out by learning, by cultural expectations, by fear, by disapproval, etc.”
Huh, I just pulled my undergrad psychology notes and I don't think I've ever heard or used "Maslow's pyramid". It's always been Maslow's Hierarchy to me.
Am I missing something here? If we're just litigating the difference between "hierarchy" and "pyramid", I just don't think there's anything worth discussing here.
I think the ordinary, uncritical reader who hears about "Maslow's hierarchy" and sees a pyramid (1) isn't necessarily committing themselves to any high-stakes claim about what Maslow originally did or didn't intend and (2) they aren't being mislead by seeing a pyramid (as opposed to anything else) to represent a hierarchical structure.
I understand that mis-quotations and misattributes are a thing, and the cultural forces that lead to them, and the ripple effects they cause, merit attention. But there's a second, parallel tradition that centers on "correcting" supposed misperceptions over trivial distinctions.
The difference is that Maslow did propose a hierarchy, and the original article is about how he never proposed a pyramid. So maybe it's dumb semantics, but I didn't start the fire.
Sure, he didn't propose that visualization, but the visualization effectively illustrates the categories he proposed and heirarchy he proposed then in.
The bigger issues are that:
(1) Maslow’s research explicitly was focussed on elites that he referred to as a “master race”,
(2) The universal heirarchy he proposed has not been substantiated by subsequent research without the express problematic focus Maslow started from,
(3) Research tends to show fewer, and more culturally variable, categories, with the heirarchies in which they fall also culturally variable.
Careful there. It is true that Maslow did not have as much data as he should have (and would've liked). He admits it as much, and repeatedly warns in his books that "more data is needed". That said, on your point (2), he explicitly says in his paper (A Theory of Human Motivation) that the "hierarchy" is not absolutely universal:
"No claim is made that it is ultimate or universal for all cultures. The claim is made only that it is relatively more ultimate, more universal, more basic, than the superficial conscious desires from culture to culture [...]"
(Where "it" == Maslow's classification of basic needs.)
* * *
A counter-point to Maslow's model is the "self-determination theory"[1]. It is "a meta-theory that consists of several mini-theories".
Some additional context is needed for such an evocative phrase. Maybe it was close in meaning to the backronym WIERD (Western Industrial Educated Rich Democratic).
Maslow studied what he called the master race of 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." Maslow studied the healthiest 1% of the college student population.
Your guess is as good as mine here. This phrase appears in Wikipedia but the citation in the article only supports the stuff in the quotation marks, not the phrase "master race":
> Maslow studied what he called the master race of 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."[11]: 236
> …
> Maslow, A (1954). Motivation and personality. New York, NY: Harper. ISBN 978-0-06-041987-5.
I took a read through the text in question ( https://archive.org/details/motivationperson00masl_0 ) and while the quoted text seems to have been quoted accurately, the phrase "master race" doesn't appear in that book. What Maslow seems to be saying in that section (from an extremely quick skim) is that he is talking about the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, although he uses the phrase "healthy people" to refer to the people he's writing about.
Right. I think it was a response to a pathology-focused psychological profession. Today we call his approach “positive psychology.” I never got any Nazi vibes reading his work — rather an attempt to deeply understand humans at their best. Rather than attributing their peak humanity to genetics, he basically gave recipes for anyone to self-actualize.
> Maslow's theory was never proven and in fact is widely criticized but it provided a starting point for people to think about theories of motivation.
That series of tweets suggests that people have misinterpreted what Maslow himself was theorizing, so it kind of sounds like what people are criticizing is a strawman that did not originate with Maslow himself.
Okay, but maybe later research validates the pyramid model more strongly than Maslow intended? We like the idea for the idea. Not because Maslow said it. He's not a prophet.
Where did Maslow put sex on the hierarchy? Or did he at all? I've seen version of the pyramid where it was actually on 2 different levels, so where did Maslow put it?
I’ve seen the same, though I don’t have a source at the moment. It was both a basic physiological and psychologic need. Which makes sense if you think about it.
It gave the same vibe as my teacher who made a captivating speech where he said he watched Animal Planet and he felt sorry for the ostriches who buried their heads in the sand and will have their necks chopped off by hunters.
Is Maslow’s Pyramid the same thing as the Heirarchy of Needs, or is it intended to convey something else? I’ve not heard of it referred to as a pyramid before.
Or is the concern here more that this (or hierarchies in general) should not be conveyed via pyramidal structures?
I learned about Maslow in business school, and have come across the Hierarchy many many times since then, and I e never heard the term ‘Maslow’s Pyramid’.
Is this a regional thing, or common in a specific discipline?
Do a comment search on hn/algolia for both terms. 290 results for pyramid, 1096 for hierarchy.
I conclude that the pyramid terminology isn't a strawman completely out of left field, but also isn't representative of the way most people understand Maslow's theory.
I think 10th grade was the right time for me to hear about Maslow and his theories as a matter of history in a high-school psychology class. The hierarchy seemed too simple to survive any of the college level complexity I experienced in subsequent education, though.
I can’t recommend Maslow’s 1966 Esalen lecture enough.[0] He speaks of the existential purpose that is the driving force behind self-actualization. Of course, Capitalism sees weakness in spiritual rigor and would attempt to exploit such an idea; however, his description of purpose as phenomenon was personally quite inspiring.
It sounds like Maslow was commissioned to develop a theory of reward and motivation that would allow managers and executives to dangle carrots to get more work out of employees without, you know, paying them more.
I knew "self-actualization" smelled like bullshit.
The whole thing is nonsense pseudoscience regardless of what shape it's in.
Being taught Freud and Maslow at least contributed to the reasons I dropped out of college. You can lack personal safety but still have self-esteem and self-realization. In fact some of the most self-realized people in history lived in some of the most dangerous times and places. I'm sure there are Monks who are more self-realized than any of the people Maslow would consider to be at the top of his hierarchy, and they definitely don't need Prestige or a Feeling of Accomplishment (aka the narcissistic human ego) to reach a higher level of human consciousness.
It's a map, not the territory. The degree each person "needs" on of those things varies a lot between people. It's not strictly necessary to fulfill one level before achieving something on the next one either. The idea is that it's easier to go higher when you've already filled-out the stuff below.
To your sentence "You can lack personal safety but still have self-esteem and self-realization." I would not agree. You may have a very low need for personal safety so that it is satisfied, but those are so far apart you're unlikely to reach self-actualization if your safety needs are not met.
> It's not strictly necessary to fulfill one level before achieving something on the next one either. The idea is that it's easier to go higher when you've already filled-out the stuff below.
This is literally the definition of pseudoscience. If it can't be replicated, it's not science. If it can't fit within the bounds of the scientific method, it's not fact, it's wishful thinking. Statements like "it's a map not a territory" and it "varies...between people" is indoctrination, not education. You'll hear exactly the same statements and circular reasoning come out of cults and religious institutions.
> You may have a very low need for personal safety so that it is satisfied, but those are so far apart you're unlikely to reach self-actualization if your safety needs are not met.
Ghandi did not have personal safety, but he was certainly self-actualized. Nelson Mandela spent his life in prison, and yet raised an entire country to a higher level of consciousness. Some of the greatest scientists, leaders, and artists in history were the most persecuted. But today, in the 21st century, we live in the safest time in history, with the least struggles in history, the most abundance, and what do we have? Millions of people with depression and mental illness, who are the farthest thing from being self-actualized. From this the only conclusion I can come to is that people like Abraham Maslow were quacks, trying to rationalize their own ego, and don't deserve any place in modern academia.
>> Ghandi did not have personal safety, but he was certainly self-actualized.
His need for personal safety was low and probably satisfied.
>> Nelson Mandela spent his life in prison, and yet raised an entire country to a higher level of consciousness.
"higher level of consciousness" sounds like that pseudo-science stuff you don't like.
>> Some of the greatest scientists, leaders, and artists in history were the most persecuted. But today, in the 21st century, we live in the safest time in history, with the least struggles in history, the most abundance, and what do we have? Millions of people with depression and mental illness, who are the farthest thing from being self-actualized.
And? One might conclude that overcoming adversity is a solid path to self-actualized, even though - again - you think that whole concept is pseudo-science ;-)
Perhaps those people personally felt enough personal safety, because it wasn't especially important to them. Anyway, something doesn't need to be true for every human being, everywhere, at all times for it to be a good general observation.
Related paper: https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.5465/amle.2017.0351