Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs Health Article

Other human needs

Maslow described other needs that did not fit into his hierarchy. These included cognitive needs, such as curiosity and scientific interest, as well as aesthetic needs, which include the need for beauty and order. As Maslow studied self-actualizing individuals, he also discovered a range of needs that extend beyond self-actualization. He called these needs transcendence needs or B-values. They refer to needs to contribute to human welfare and to find higher meanings in life. Although transcendence needs are usually described as lying somewhere beyond the need for self-actualization, these needs are not included in most formulations of Maslow's needs hierarchy.

While Maslow described human needs as a hierarchy, he allowed for some departures from the strict order of his needs hierarchy. He stated that lower needs must be reasonably well satisfied in order for the person to focus on higher needs, but he noted that complete satisfaction of a given need may not be possible or necessary. He indicated that most people would show a range of need satisfaction levels at any given time. For example, a person might be 85% satisfied in the area of physiological needs, 60% satisfied in the area of safety needs, 45% satisfied in the area of love and belongingness needs, and so on. Maslow also noted situations in which lower needs might be ignored in favor of higher needs, as when an artist sacrifices comfort and security in order to pursue aesthetic goals, or when a student postpones looking for a romantic partner in order to earn high grades and get into a prestigious graduate program. Maslow thought, however, that these departures from a strict hierarchy did not invalidate his general theory.

The historical context of Maslow's theories

At the time Maslow developed his theory in the early 1960s, psychology was dominated by two views of human behavior, the psychoanalytic and the behaviorist. The psychoanalytic view emphasized unconscious conflicts and drives, drawing many of its concepts from case studies of neurotic people. The behaviorist view emphasized the role of learning and derived many of its principles from observations of animal behavior. Maslow pointed out that the psychoanalysts had failed to consider the behavior of healthy human beings, while the behaviorists were too mechanistic and largely ignored subjective experience. He thought that no theory of human personality could be complete without a thorough study of healthy functioning, so he set out to examine the conscious motivations and experiences of healthy individuals. One important finding was that psychologically healthy people were more likely to report what Maslow called "peak experiences." A peak experience, according to Maslow, is one in which the individual loses a sense of time and place and experiences a momentary feeling of unity with the universe. It is a particularly intense form of growth experience.

Maslow's perspective, together with similar approaches proposed by Carl Rogers, Gordon Allport, and others, came to be known as the "third force" in psychology. Because of their focus on the positive, growth-oriented aspects of human behavior, these views are also described as humanistic theories of behavior. They stimulated the emergence and rapid growth of the human potential movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.