An
Introduction to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) was an American psychologist who is
most noted for developing the hierarchy of needs theory. Considered the founder
of humanistic
psychology, Maslow typically wrote about such topics as behavior and
motivation, and first introduced the hierarchy of needs in his 1943 paper, A
Theory of Human Motivation.
The basic premise of this theory is that humans are born with
certain needs, which can be categorized into levels depending on their degree
of importance. Our most fundamental needs are physiological needs, and then
safety needs, love needs, esteem needs, and finally the need for
self-actualization. The idea is that as we fulfill our most basic needs in life
we are able to move upward and fulfill the more complex needs represented higher
on the hierarchy. We will not seek to reach higher levels, however, until our
most basic needs are realized.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory is commonly depicted as a
five-tier pyramid, in which the bottom level represents our physiological
needs, or the most critical needs for life. In this category are the
requirements necessary for survival: food, water, air, warmth, and sleep. Once
these needs have been addressed, we are able to move onto the next level, which
is comprised of safety needs.
The need to feel safe and secure is psychological as well as
physical, and may manifest itself in different ways depending on individual
circumstances. Job security and a stable family environment are two examples of
ways individuals seek to bring safety into their lives, and feeling removed
from danger is an important step in reaching more advanced platforms of the
pyramid.
When we feel out of danger and secure in the world, we are able
to progress up the hierarchy and begin to fulfill our needs of love and belonging.
In the third level of the pyramid, our social needs become a priority only
after our physiological and safety requirements have been met and maintained.
Our affiliation with and acceptance by others becomes the focus of our desires.
While many adults look to fill this need by marrying someone and starting a
family, children seek belonging from their parents and teenagers work to gain
acceptance from their peers.
The fourth tier of the pyramid is reserved for esteem needs, or
the need for achievement, confidence, respect, recognition, and approval.
People increase their self-esteem by gaining an education, advancing in their
careers, and working to improve themselves.
After all the previous needs have been met, an individual is
capable of achieving the highest point in the pyramid – self-actualization.
According to Maslow, fulfilling this need means reaching one’s highest
potential and truly understanding one’s self. Few people reach this level in
their lifetime, and even fewer stay there on a consistent basis. If the
previous levels are thought to be oriented towards physical and psychological
needs, the fifth level can be considered more spiritual in nature.
While there are some critiques of the theory, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
has informed scholars in many fields from education to healthcare, and
continues to be applied to a diverse set of academic disciples. Moreover, it
remains an important contribution to humanistic psychological theory, and is
still relevant to discussions today regarding human behavior and
motivation.
This is the definitive and original Maslow's
Hierarchy of Needs.
Each of us is motivated by needs. Our most basic needs are
inborn, having evolved over tens of thousands of years. Abraham Maslow's
Hierarchy of Needs helps to explain how these needs motivate us all.
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs states that we must satisfy each
need in turn, starting with the first, which deals with the most obvious needs
for survival itself.
Only when the lower order needs of physical and emotional
well-being are satisfied are we concerned with the higher order needs of
influence and personal development.
Conversely, if the things that satisfy our lower order needs are
swept away, we are no longer concerned about the maintenance of our higher
order needs.
Maslow's original Hierarchy of Needs model was developed between
1943-1954, and first widely published in Motivation and Personality in 1954. At
this time the Hierarchy of Needs model comprised five needs. This original
version remains for most people the definitive Hierarchy of Needs.
Where Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is shown with
more than five levels these models have been extended through interpretation of
Maslow's work by other people. These augmented models and diagrams are shown as
the adapted seven and eight-stage Hierarchy of needs pyramid diagrams and
models below.
1. Biological and Physiological needs - air, food, drink, shelter, warmth,
sex, sleep, etc.
2. Safety needs - protection from elements, security,
order, law, limits, stability, etc.
3. Belongingness and Love needs - work group, family, affection, relationships,
etc.
4. Esteem needs - self-esteem, achievement, mastery,
independence, status, dominance, prestige, managerial responsibility, etc.
5. Cognitive needs - knowledge, meaning, etc.
6. Aesthetic needs - appreciation and search for beauty,
balance, form, etc.
7. Self-Actualization needs - realizing personal potential,
self-fulfillment, seeking personal growth and peak experiences.
8. Transcendence needs - helping others to achieve self
actualization.
Maslow sees all these needs as essentially survival needs. Even love and esteem are needed for the maintenance of health. He says we all have these needs built in to us genetically, like instincts. In fact, he calls them instinctoid -- instinct-like -- needs.
In terms of overall development, we move through these levels a bit like stages. As newborns, our focus (if not our entire set of needs) is on the physiological. Soon, we begin to recognize that we need to be safe. Soon after that, we crave attention and affection. A bit later, we look for self-esteem. Mind you, this is in the first couple of years!
Under stressful conditions, or when survival is threatened, we can “regress” to a lower need level. When you great career falls flat, you might seek out a little attention. When your family ups and leaves you, it seems that love is again all you ever wanted. When you face chapter eleven after a long and happy life, you suddenly can’t think of anything except money.
These things can occur on a society-wide basis as well: When society suddenly flounders, people start clamoring for a strong leader to take over and make things right. When the bombs start falling, they look for safety. When the food stops coming into the stores, their needs become even more basic.
Maslow suggested that we can ask people for their “philosophy of the future” -- what would their ideal life or world be like -- and get significant information as to what needs they do or do not have covered.
If you have significant problems along your development -- a period of extreme insecurity or hunger as a child, or the loss of a family member through death or divorce, or significant neglect or abuse -- you may “fixate” on that set of needs for the rest of your life.
This is Maslow’s understanding of neurosis. Perhaps you went
through a war as a kid. Now you have everything your heart needs -- yet you
still find yourself obsessing over having enough money and keeping the pantry
well-stocked. Or perhaps your parents divorced when you were young.
Now you have a wonderful spouse -- yet you get insanely jealous or worry
constantly that they are going to leave you because you are not “good enough”
for them.
Self-actualization
These are needs that do not
involve balance or homeostasis. Once engaged, they continue to be
felt. In fact, they are likely to become stronger as we “feed”
them! They involve the continuous desire to fulfill potentials, to “be
all that you can be.” They are a matter of becoming the most complete,
the fullest, “you” -- hence the term, self-actualization.Now, in keeping with his theory up to this point, if you want to be truly self-actualizing, you need to have your lower needs taken care of, at least to a considerable extent. This makes sense: If you are hungry, you are scrambling to get food; If you are unsafe, you have to be continuously on guard; If you are isolated and unloved, you have to satisfy that need; If you have a low sense of self-esteem, you have to be defensive or compensate. When lower needs are unmet, you can’t fully devote yourself to fulfilling your potentials.
These people were reality-centered, which means they could differentiate what is fake and dishonest from what is real and genuine. They were problem-centered, meaning they treated life’s difficulties as problems demanding solutions, not as personal troubles to be railed at or surrendered to. And they had a different perception of means and ends. They felt that the ends don’t necessarily justify the means, that the means could be ends themselves, and that the means -- the journey -- was often more important than the ends.
The self-actualizers also had a different way of relating to others. First, they enjoyed solitude, and were comfortable being alone. And they enjoyed deeper personal relations with a few close friends and family members, rather than more shallow relationships with many people.
They enjoyed autonomy, a relative independence from physical and social needs. And they resisted enculturation, that is, they were not susceptible to social pressure to be "well adjusted" or to "fit in" -- they were, in fact, nonconformists in the best sense.
They had an unhostile sense of humor -- preferring to joke at their own expense, or at the human condition, and never directing their humor at others. They had a quality he called acceptance of self and others, by which he meant that these people would be more likely to take you as you are than try to change you into what they thought you should be. This same acceptance applied to their attitudes towards themselves: If some quality of theirs wasn’t harmful, they let it be, even enjoying it as a personal quirk. On the other hand, they were often strongly motivated to change negative qualities in themselves that could be changed. Along with this comes spontaneity and simplicity: They preferred being themselves rather than being pretentious or artificial. In fact, for all their nonconformity, he found that they tended to be conventional on the surface, just where less self-actualizing nonconformists tend to be the most dramatic.
GENERAL
APPLICATION
The deficiency or basic needs are said to
motivate people when they are unmet. Also, the need to fulfill such needs will
become stronger the longer the duration they are denied. For example, the
longer a person goes without food the more hungry they will become.
One must
satisfy lower level basic needs before progressing on to meet higher level
growth needs. Once these needs have been reasonably satisfied, one may be able
to reach the highest level called self-actualization.
Every
person is capable and has the desire to move up the hierarchy toward a level of
self-actualization. Unfortunately, progress is often disrupted by failure to
meet lower level needs. Life experiences, including divorce and loss of job may
cause an individual to fluctuate between levels of the hierarchy.
Maslow's
Hierarchy of Needs will be a blunt instrument if used as such. The way you use
the Hierarchy of Needs determines the subtlety and sophistication of the model.
For
example: the common broad-brush interpretation of Maslow's famous theory
suggests that that once a need is satisfied the person moves onto the next, and
to an extent this is entirely correct. However an overly rigid application of
this interpretation will produce a rigid analysis, and people and motivation
are more complex. So while it is broadly true that people move up (or down) the
hierarchy, depending what's happening to them in their lives, it is also true
that most people motivational 'set' at any time comprises elements of all of
the motivational drivers. For example, self-actualizers (level 5 - original model) are mainly
focused on self-actualizing but are still motivated to eat (level 1) and socialize (level 3).
Similarly, homeless folk whose main focus is feeding themselves (level 1) and finding shelter for
the night (level 2) can also be, albeit to a lesser extent, still concerned
with social relationships (level
3), how their friends perceive them (level 4), and even the meaning of life (level
5 - original model).
Like
any simple model, Maslow's theory not a fully responsive system - it's a guide
which requires some interpretation and thought, given which, it remains
extremely useful and applicable for understanding, explaining and handling many
human behavior situations.
The teacher and Learners
Firstly, students should be able to choose what
they want to learn. Humanistic teachers believe that students will be motivated
to learn a subject if it's something they need and want to know but in this
lesson the teacher doesn’t allow students to choose
What they want to learn. As soon as she took an
attendance and after she gave information about final exam, she started to
explain her lesson.
Students didn’t concentrate on the lesson. They didn’t
have any motivation. Therefore; most of students didn’t listen to the subject. The
goal of education should be to foster students' desire to learn and teach them
how to learn. Students should be self-motivated in their studies and desire to
learn on their own. Yes, in this subject, she is right. She often gave some
instructions how they need learn the subjects.
Despite of this, students lost their attention,
they don’t desire to learn. They go bored then and started to make noise. However;
humanistic educators believe that grades are irrelevant and that only
self-evaluation is meaningful. Grading encourages students to work for a grade
and not for personal satisfaction. In addition, humanistic educators are
opposed to objective tests because they test a student's ability to memorize
and do not provide sufficient educational feedback to the teacher and student.
According that the teacher mentions about the exam,
she doesn’t watch the student’s objective
evaluation out. This teacher generally avail the
Students of their
success according to the exam. This is not suitable the humanistic approach. Humanistic
educators believe that both feelings and knowledge are important to the learning
process. Unlike traditional educators, humanistic teachers do not separate the cognitive
and affective domains and humanistic educators insist that schools need to
provide students with an environment so that they will feel secure to
learn. Once students feel secure, learning becomes easier and more meaningful.
Sometimes the students didn’t understand the
subject and they can ask the questions and the teacher also asks if the students
have any questions about the lesson. For this, the learners feel secure to
learn, absolutely.
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