Trench madness: the neurosis of the First World War.
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What motivates human behavior? According to humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow, our actions are motivated to achieve certain needs. To explain motivation, Maslow introduced the concept of a hierarchy of needs in 1943. This hierarchy suggests that people are motivated to satisfy basic needs before moving on to more advanced needs.
While some of the existing schools of thought at the time, such as psychoanalysis or behaviorism, tended to focus on problem behaviors, Maslow was much more interested in discovering and understanding what drives people to behave as they do and why some feel happier with their choices.
As a humanist, Maslow believed that people have an innate desire for self-actualization. That is, to be all that they can be. However, in order to use resources to achieve these goals, other more basic needs, such as the need for food, security or love, must first be met.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a motivational theory in psychology comprising a five-level model of human needs, often represented as hierarchical levels within a pyramid.
Maslow's hierarchy of needsMaslow asserted that people are motivated to fulfill certain needs in a hierarchical manner. Our most basic need would be physical survival, and this would be the first to motivate our behavior. Once that level is reached, the next level would also take precedence over the next, and so on.
These are the five different levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The first level is the base of the pyramid and the others are built on top of it.
Physiological needs. Biological requirements for human survival (such as air, food, drink, shelter, clothing, warmth, sex, sleep...).
If these needs are not satisfied, the human body cannot function optimally.
Maslow considers physiological needs to be the most important, as all other needs become secondary until these needs are satisfied.
Safety needs. Protection from elements, security, safety, order, law, stability, freedom, freedom from fear.....
Love and belonging needs. Friendship, intimacy, trust, acceptance, receiving and giving affection, love, being part of a group....
Once physiological and safety needs are met, the third level of human needs is social and involves feelings of belonging.
The need for interpersonal relationships motivates behavior.
Need for recognition (ego and self-esteem)
Maslow classified this need into two categories: self-esteem (dignity, achievement, mastery, independence) and the desire for reputation or respect from others (status, prestige).
Maslow indicated that the need for respect or reputation is more important for children and adolescents and precedes true self-esteem or dignity.
Self-realization needs: realization of personal potential, self-actualization, pursuit of personal growth and peak experiences.
"What a man can be, he must be," Maslow explained, referring to the need for people to develop their full potential as human beings.
Self-actualized people are self-aware, concerned with personal growth, less concerned with the opinions of others, and interested in reaching their potential.
"Deficiency needs" versus "Growth needs "This five-stage model can be divided into deficiency and growth needs. The first four levels are often referred to as deficiency needs and the top level is referred to as growth needs. Deficiency needs arise due to deprivation and are said to motivate people when they are not satisfied. Moreover, the motivation to satisfy such needs will become stronger the longer they go unmet.
Maslow originally said that people must satisfy lower level deficiency needs before progressing to satisfy higher level growth needs. However, he later clarified that the satisfaction of a need is not an "all or nothing" phenomenon: it would rather be a matter of degree.
When a deficiency need has been "more or less" satisfied, it will disappear and our activities will be oriented towards the next set of needs to be met. These now become our primary needs. In this sense, we always count on needs to be met: this is well known, for example, by Facebook, which offers us a wall of posts that never ends.
On the other hand, growth needs do not come from the lack of something, but from the desire to evolve as a person. Once these growth needs have been reasonably satisfied, one can reach the highest level, called self-realization.
Every person is capable of and has the desire to move up the hierarchy to a level of self-realization. Unfortunately, progress is often interrupted because meeting the needs of lower levels demands too many of our resources. On the other hand, different experiences and experiences can cause an individual to fluctuate between levels of the hierarchy.
Therefore, not everyone will move through the hierarchy in a unidirectional way, but may move back and forth between different types of needs. In fact, Maslow pointed out that the order in which these needs are satisfied does not always follow this standard progression. For example, he noted that for some people the need for self-esteem is more important than the need for love. For others, the need for creative fulfillment may supersede even the most basic needs.
Limitations of Maslow's hierarchy of needs theoryThe most significant limitation of Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory relates to his methodology. Maslow reviewed the biographies and writings of 18 people he identified as self-actualized. From these sources, he developed a list of qualities that he identified as common to this specific group of people.
From a scientific perspective, there are numerous problems with this methodology. On the one hand, it could be argued that biographical analysis as a method is very subjective, as it relies entirely on the judgment of the researcher. Personal opinion is always prone to bias, which reduces the validity of the data obtained. Therefore, Maslow's operational definition of self-actualization should not be blindly accepted as a scientific fact.
On the other hand, Maslow's biographical analysis focused on a biased sample of self-actualized individuals, limited to well-educated white men, including Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, and Aldous Huxley, among others). Moreover, although Maslow did study self-actualized women, such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Mother Teresa, they constituted a small proportion of his sample. All this makes it difficult to generalize his theory. Moreover, it is extremely difficult to empirically test Maslow's concept of self-actualization.
Another criticism of Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory concerns the assumption he made that the lowest needs must be satisfied before a person can reach his or her potential and become self-actualized. This is not always the case.
Through examination of cultures in which large numbers of people live in poverty, it is clear that people are able to satisfy higher order needs, such as love and belonging, while having very few basic needs met. However, this should not be the case, since, according to Maslow, people who have difficulty meeting very basic physiological needs (such as food, shelter, etc.) are not able to meet higher growth needs.
Moreover, many creative people, such as some artists (e.g., Rembrandt and Van Gogh) lived in poverty throughout their lives, yet it might be thought that they devoted much of their resources to meeting higher needs.
Psychologists now conceptualize motivation as a more complex agent, so that different needs - of different orders - could act as motivation simultaneously. A person can be motivated by higher growth needs at the same time as by lower level needs (deficiency needs).
Despite the criticisms, Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory remains a reference. It constitutes the starting point for many works that seek to understand why we behave as we do or why the same outcome can produce very different reactions in different people.
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