Maslow\'s Models in His Experiments

Maslow's Models

In his experiments with monkeys early in his career, Abraham Maslow, a leading American psychologist, noticed that certain needs are stronger or more basic than others. Food, water, air and sex are basic needs that men and animals require to survive, but air is the strongest or most important, followed by water, food and then sex (Boeree 1970). He figured that motivation derives from these basic needs for survival, which are physiological in nature, and from them, he derived a hierarchy of needs. He arranged these needs under five broad categories, i.e. physiological, safety and security, love and belonging, esteem and self-actualization, whereby one category cannot be achieved unless the previous one is satisfied. Until it is satisfied, motivation is fixated at that level. Maslow proposed that all motivation is towards self-actualization (Boerre).

Physiological needs cover everything required by organic survival against death, not restricted to air, water, food, and sex and are numerous (Simone et al. 1987), depending on the description. These include protein, salt, sugar, minerals, vitamins, a normal pH balance, a given temperature, sleep, activity, elimination of wastes, the avoidance of pain and even Vitamin C (Boeree 1970). When these organic needs are constantly satisfied, the organism or person becomes free and motivated to pursue and fulfill the next higher category of needs.

In the second category are needs for safety and a sense of security, stability, dependency, protection, freedom from fear and anxiety. When physical and biological needs are met, the individual looks out of himself and seeks for protection in his environment (Simone et al. 1987). He wants to live under safe and secure circumstances, looks for a stable environmental structure, a safe neighborhood, job security, insurance and retirement plans. If these needs are satisfied, the person proceeds to the next higher category. Otherwise, his motivation remains in that unsatisfied or incompletely satisfied category.

Needs for belongingness and love evolve around giving and receiving affection. If these are not gratified sufficiently, the person will hunger for relationships with people in general (Boeree 1970), specifically for a place in a family. If the needs are not filled, the person will react intensely to the absence of friends, a mate or children and go to extreme ends to fill them. Achieving this belonging becomes the most important of all his pursuits. When he was in the physiological phase, love did not seem too real or important. But now he is most besieged by loneliness, rejection, friendlessness or not having a family or roots. The feeling of belonging is his foremost motivation. This is experienced in everyday life, not only by a desire to marry and have a family, but also by becoming part of a community, an organization or a career (Boeree 1970)

With the first three categories of needs fulfilled, the person now seeks the need to be valued or esteemed by others. The need may be a desire to become strong, to achieve, to become adequate, to master, and gain confidence, or to gain reputation or prestige. Every detail points to esteem by others, status, fame and glory, dominance, dignity and importance (Simone et al. 1987). The person wants to develop self-confidence, a sense of worth, strength, capability and usefulness to the world. When the need is frustrated, the person develops a sense of inferiority, weakness and helplessness.

Maslow pointed to a lower need and a higher need for self-esteem (Boeree 1970). A person with the lower kind of need for self-esteem seeks the respect of others, status, fame, glory, recognition, attention, reputation, appreciation or mastery and dominance over others. The higher form involves the need for self-respect, as in a feeling of self-confidence, achievement, independence and freedom. The difference is that a person who has already achieved self-respect, it is difficult to lose (Boeree 1970). Maslow believed that most psychological and safety problems occur in this stage in the form of low self-esteem and inferiority complexes. Physical and environmental needs are no problem with advanced countries today and the need for belonging and love is relatively attained as well. But most troubles begin with the difficulty of obtaining other people's esteem.

Maslow described the four categories or levels of need as deficit needs or D-needs. They are deficit needs in that a person feels the need if it is not satisfied or filled (Boerre 1970) adequately, but feels nothing at all when it is met adequately. The person inherently seeks homeostasis or balance, not just in the biological or physiological level, but also in the psychological or emotional level. Maslow viewed all the four levels of needs as survival requirements, so that even love and esteem become necessary for the maintenance of health as instinctively as genetic structures. He suggested that strong and unresolved conflicts in any phase or category, during which a person feels extreme insecurity, can fixate that person or develop neurosis in him. These conflicts include extreme hunger in childhood, the death or loss of a family member, severe neglect or abuse (Boeree). Neurosis can turn up later in life when a person performs unexplainable compulsions or obsessions without warranted causes for them, like checking out on locked doors, keeping the kitchen well-stocked and seeking reassurances of one's importance. Neurosis is a psychological malfunction or disorder.

The last level or category of needs is vastly different from the first four. Maslow believed that meeting all the first four levels can still produce a different kind of restlessness and discontent until and unless a person becomes what he is fit to do or become. This is the self-actualization category (Simone et al. 1987), where the person comes to an ultimate fulfillment. A musician, for example, reaches self-actualization when he or she makes music, when an artist paints or writes, when he or she becomes true to himself or herself or true nature. Maslow later redefined this category as a function of peak experiences (Simone et al.), wherein one is taken out of himself or herself, feels very small or very large with nature or God and part of the infinite (Boeree 1970). Peak experiences create so much impact as to change a person. They are also called mystical experiences among religious and philosophical sectors

Maslow also called it growth motivation, as opposed to deficit motivation, and B. Or being needs, as differentiated from D. Or deficit needs. Self-actualization does not require balance or homeostasis, as do deficit needs (Boeree 1970). Deficit needs stop when satisfied and the person graduates to a higher level, but self-actualization increases as it is fed. It establishes a continuous desire to fulfill one's potential, or the most and the best that one can be. Maslow argued that actualizing oneself requires that all preceding and lower needs must be adequately met. The hungry must first be adequately fed, the unloved be unconditionally loved, and the emotionally insecure sufficiently assured that he or she is worthwhile before they can begin to approach and realize their potentials. Frank and stark conditions of increasing unrest, poverty, crime and disease in the world suggest that not too many have come to this level, where Maslow proposed only two per cent of human beings belong (Boeree).

Maslow experimented on an initial group of self-actualizers through a method called biographical analysis. These self-actualizers included Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Benedict Spinoza, Albert Schweitzer, Aldous Huxley and 12 others living during Maslow's time. He studied their biographies, works, actions and words and, from these, developed a list of common qualities among them and uncommon among average individuals (Boeree 1970). He found that these prominent figures were reality-centered, problem-centered, and perceived means and ends differently; had a different way of relating with others, a fresh and un-hostile sense of humor. Maslow's experiment showed that a self-actualizer enjoys or is comfortable with aloneness or solitude, has few close friendships and relationships in contrast with those who demand or form many but shallow relationships; has and enjoys autonomy and independence; shows respect and appreciation for others as he or she respects and appreciates himself or herself; and is humble (Boerre). As already mentioned, the self-actualizer has frequent peak experiences, which set him or her apart from the ordinary person quite distinctively.

By his hierarchy of needs, Maslow maintained that the human personality is so constructed that his ultimate fulfillment and existence depend on the adequate satisfaction of each category of needs in that exact chronology or timetable. The more need categories fulfilled, the nearer the person gets to the fullness of his existence, hence Maslow's humanist-existential approach to personality development. In counseling, a person's past is recorded, analyzed and evaluated in search for fixations in any of the stages, as these fixations are the motivations of that person's behavior, whether conscious or unconscious. Maslow's method gives greatest focus on his physical, psychological and social needs as a person and his or her right to become the most and best of what he or she can be (Simone et al. 1987, Boeree 1970).

Maslow's emphasis on the human person and his experience brought him attention and made him a very inspiring figure and thinker on personality theories, particularly in the trying times of the 60s when people were burdened and disillusioned by the hard, reductionistic and mechanistic stance and teachings of behaviorists and physiological psychologists (Boeree 1970). Maslow gave them that self-meaning and appreciation and became one of the pioneers of a movement that brought the focus of individual feeling, yearning and wholeness into psychology. He sort of read them out and spoke their thoughts, feelings and aspirations for them. He devoted much energy to humanistic psychology and the human potential and inaugurated the "fourth force" in psychology towards the end of his life. The first force consisted of Freud and other depth psychologists; the second force, the behaviorists; his own humanism and European existentialism, the third. This fourth force was made up of transpersonal psychologies that derived from European philosophies, which examined meditation, higher consciousness levels and para-psychological phenomena and which reacted against the then dominant psychoanalysis and behaviorism schools of the 20th century. Among the most prominent European philosophers were Kierkegaard, Husserl and Heidegger and the most prominent in the humanist/existential group were Carl Rogers, Maslow and Rollo May. Humanist/existentialist psychologists rejected Freud's deterministic position and the individual behavior's lack of ability to deal with his own nature (Boeree) and instead placed prime focused on human psychology and human factors, such as choice, responsibility, freedom and the meanings in human life (Boeree). In handling neurosis and other mental or psychological disorders, the person must be viewed according to the level of fulfillment of his or her needs in the four or five categories. His or her behavior should be viewed mechanically, as driven by inner psychological forces, programmed external circumstances or reinforcements, or certain genetic structures, but as the result of choice and the meanings created from the choices made.

According to Maslow's humanist/existentialist model, understanding and enhancing the development of the individual provide the key to his or her personal health, which can and will emerge if nothing in the family or society thwarts this inner unfolding in a free, unique and healthy direction (Beneckson). If and when this happens, the person achieves self-actualization, which Maslow and other humanistic personality theorists agree is the goal of healthy human development. The goal of counseling, therefore, is to help the individual receiving it to actualize himself or herself, since self-actualization is itself a need and the highest kind (Beneckson, Simone et al. 1987). The human organism constantly moves in that direction of fulfilling or actualizing itself, but stark realities in life get on the way of its progress, needs are unmet and obstructions occur until they are taken out. The meeting of needs or the elimination of these snags and snarls becomes the basic motivation behind every act of the organism (Beneckson).

His initial concept focused on only one growth need, which is self-actualization, which is premised on the fulfillment or satisfaction of all the needs in earlier and lower stages of personality development. He first assumed that self-actualizers are problem-focused, possess a fresh appreciation of life, are concerned with personal growth and have or are capable of peak experiences (Huitt 2004). But he later modified his concept of growth need for self-actualization by identifying two lower-level growth needs that must be met before achieving self-actualization (Maslow and Lowery 1998 as qtd in Huitt) and one after or beyond it. The two categories of need before self-actualization are those of knowledge and aesthetics, while the category beyond self-actualization is self-transcendence. The needs to know, understand and explore are cognitive; aesthetic needs are for order, beauty and symmetry; and the need for self-transcendence aspires to connect beyond the self and help others fulfill themselves and realize their own potentials too (Huitt). Notice that cognitive needs present themselves only after the four earlier categories or levels of needs are adequately met but before the need for self-actualization is confronted or apprehended. In his renewed version, Maslow suggested that, in the process of actualizing and transcending oneself, a person acquires knowledge and becomes wise in the choices to be made in a variety of situations or problems.

Other thinkers and observers believed that Maslow's concept of the highest levels of self-actualization as transcendent in nature is his most important contribution to the science and study of human behavior and motivation (Daniels 2001 as qtd in Huitt 2004). They also suggested that Maslow's famous hierarchy of needs reflects all the kinds of information a person seeks at different levels of development (Norwood 1999 as qtd in Huitt). Maslow's cognitive model helps an individual with unmet needs in the lower categories find the appropriate coping information or provides that information that will lead to the satisfaction or fulfilling of the need. If the information provided does not directly meet or connect to the satisfaction of the need within the time span required, the need remains unfilled (Huitt). His cognitive model can help acquire or lead to information that will accrue to the safety or security of the person under counseling. It can enlighten one who has a need for love and a sense of belonging, often found or widely-available in books relationship development and enrichment. If the need is for empowerment and esteem and how the ego can be developed, this modified version can provide the right or precise information. One who has reached the growth levels of cognitive, aesthetic or self-actualization also seeks information that will edify himself or herself by connecting to something beyond ego boundaries or by edifying others (Norwood as qtd in Huitt).

But not too long after Maslow appeared in the scene, another movement emerged and once more focused on the grueling, the impersonal and the mechanical from which he turned his back: information processing, computers and stringently rationalist theories, such as those by Jean Piaget's cognitive development theory and Noam Chomsky's linguistics (Boeree). The emerged cognitive movement soon established itself in the field and provided solid scientific ground to researchers and students on which to do their work. Meantime, Maslow's humanist-existential theory was relegated and reduced to mere impetus or inclination for self-indulgence, magic or even drug abuse (Boeree).

Maslow's theory was also discredited on certain grounds. One was his un-scientific methodology of studying certain aspects of the character of a limited group of subjects whom he perceived and declared as "self-actualizers." But he could also have intended to provide a starting point or suggest a direction, which he hoped others would take off from, rather than set up as the only established concept of personality development. As the father of American humanism, he started as a behaviorist with a strong physiological foundation and certainly made assumptions based on biological or scientific grounds or laws. He only attempted to extend its realm to include psychology (Boeree) in the hope of helping those who seek solutions to psychological problems or attain personal fulfillment and wholeness.

Maslow was also criticized for setting a two-percent limit to self-actualizers in the world. Other personality theorists believe that self-actualizers include every living creature that try to grow, to become more and fulfill its biological destiny (Boeree 1970). While one theorist contended that babies were the best examples of self-actualization, Maslow maintained that self-actualization is hardly achieved by the very young.

There have been attempts by other theorists to augment or suggest modifications on Maslow's models towards the same objective self-actualization and achievement of one's highest human potential (Huitt 2004). They all agreed the rest agree that much work needs to be done in this area in turning out a reliable theory that will be more helpful and informative than simply collecting, analyzing and providing data. But the currently available body of research is still vastly important to parents, educators, administrators and managers in charge of developing persons and targeting their total individual potential. It serves as a valuable outline of issues that can be used in dealing with, understanding and helping human beings of different personalities and competencies succeed in this information age (Huitt).

Learning is integral in self-actualization. Learning is presumed as one gets older and goes through life experiences that teach lessons from which the person learns or is supposed to learn. This is why Maslow said that self-actualization is rare in the very young who need to experience much in order to actualize and transcend themselves. Statistics show that the aging population is increasing and this should be read as a blessing (Dickinson 2002). Modern medicine and technology have extended longevity and old age is where self-actualization can occur, according to Maslow's theory. Older people's pool of experience and wisdom are a kind of school that no other can teach. These advantages enable them to function as leaders and advisers to younger people and also provide them the opportunity to give back to the world what they have learned as their contribution to the building of the future.