Pod Insights The Psychology of your 20s 428. The truth about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs About this episode Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is one of the most famous theories in psychology. We've all seen the pyramid. We've all been told that before we can become our best selves, we need to climb through five levels of human needs, from food and safety all the way to self-actualisation. But what if that's not actually what Maslow believed?
In this bonus episode, as part of our series myth-busting psychology, we're uncovering the surprising truth behind one of psychology's most iconic ideas, including:
Why Maslow never actually drew a pyramid The forgotten sixth level of the hierarchy The Indigenous Blackfoot origins of the theory Whether self-actualisation is really the highest human goal Why the hierarchy isn't as rigid as we've been taught What modern psychology says about the evidence behind Maslow's ideas Happy listening!
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1:35 Jemma Sbeg? Hello, everybody. I'm Jemma Sbeg, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your 20s, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our 20s, and what they mean for our psychology.
1:54 Jemma Sbeg? Hello everybody, welcome back to the show, welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we of course, break down the psychology of our twenties. Today, I have another bonus episode for you. If you are new to this series, our bonus episodes are our smaller bite-sized episodes that seek to break down and debunk certain famous psychology theories or pseudoscientific ideas you may see a lot online or hear everybody from your mum to your best friend to the guy on the train talking about. Basically, this series is, it's Mythbusters, but for psychology and in podcast form.
2:36 Jemma Sbeg? We've done the truth about dopamine, we've done personality tests, narcissism, flow states, whether the frontal lobe actually develops at 25. And today, we are doing Maslow's hierarchy of needs and why our, our understanding of it is nowhere near where it needs to be. And also why the modern day depiction of Maslow's hierarchy is actually incredibly inaccurate, maybe even false. It's a huge episode, I'm not going to waste any more time talking about things that aren't Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Let's jump straight into it. If you have a psychology background, even casually, if you have dabbled in the self-help space,
3:19 Jemma Sbeg? I think it's safe to assume you have come across the hierarchy of needs. And the hierarchy of needs, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, was formed from his like major work that he published, which was a theory of human motivation. Even if you don't know what I'm talking about by name, you have seen an image of this. You have seen an image of this in your career counselor's office, in a science textbook, on Instagram. It's usually represented as a pyramid with five layers and it's built on a simple idea. Before you can focus on becoming your fullest self, you need to satisfy the most fundamental human needs which sit at the base of the pyramid and then you work.
4:01 Jemma Sbeg? Way up. Now, this theory was developed by Abraham Maslow. He's an American psychologist and he first kind of put this together in the nineteen forty's. Maslow famously practiced a form of psychology called humanistic psychology, which prioritizes the push towards human flourishing and self-realization. And this hierarchy is like the cornerstone of this specific psychological discipline because it suggests that needs at the bottom of the pyramid, whilst seemingly basic, are essential for survival. And they're also not examined enough by psychologists.
4:41 Jemma Sbeg? And it basically instructed the academic, the psychological community, like if you wanna, if you want your patients, if you want humanity to thrive and to be fulfilled, you, we need to pay more attention to things like emotional security, financial security, just physical security, having food, having water. And he basically, he used this theory that he, he came up with to describe a lot of things and a lot of problems he saw in psychology and with humanity, like the need to address poverty in order to achieve greater psychological and intellectual thriving in society. Why we can't be creative or answer deep questions about life until we're
5:24 Jemma Sbeg? out of a place of survival and why emotional security matters just as much as physical safety or financial security. And he also, I don't think this was his intention, but it's now very much used to explain how the pathway to becoming your best self. If you cannot picture the pyramid at this stage, I would highly recommend quick, do a quick Google search of what it looks like because this episode will make a lot more sense with that visual in mind. But let me walk you through each layer, starting from the very bottom. So.
5:56 Jemma Sbeg? At the base of Maslow's pyramid are our physiological needs. Food, water, sleep, shelter, basic things required to keep us alive. These are our core human survival needs. Once we have those, the theory goes that we can then build our safety needs. Safety needs is the next layer. It is essentially saying, once survival is taken care of, we can begin to think about long-term security and physical safety. We can begin to think about our long-term health and about our routines, kind of knowing that tomorrow isn't going to be completely uncertain. The third level is love and belonging. Humans are social creatures, so we need friendship. We need family, we need intimacy, community, we need meaningful relationships.
6:41 Jemma Sbeg? We need to feel connected to other people and accepted by them. But that cannot be prioritized until, you know, you know where your next meal is going to come from, or until you feel safe. So love and belonging is the third layer. And then on top of that layer is esteem needs. This includes self-respect, confidence, achievement, recognition, essentially just this core belief and this core sense that we matter and we have value. It's really just about how we see ourselves and how we feel we're being perceived. You can kind of see at this stage how all these needs build on each other until finally we get to the top of the pyramid, which is self-actualization.
7:24 Jemma Sbeg? As I said, I think previously, this is the desire to fulfill our potential, to pursue our purpose, to express ourselves creatively, intellectually, to grow as individuals and to become who we are capable of becoming. Interestingly, later in life, Maslow actually replaced self-actualization with self-transcendence as the highest human goal. I said replaced, that's not true. He basically added an additional layer and that additional layer or level was self-transcendence. Self-actualization to him was rather individualistic. And he kind of took issue with how people were interpreting it the older that he got.
8:08 Jemma Sbeg? Ultimately, he realized that being able to be kind to others, our capacity for altruism, for Empathy to take our good fortune and pass it on, being a good community member. That is the peak of the human experience, not feeling accomplished, not feeling like you know yourself. There's two words that Maslow loved to use to describe this, and they are probably two of the hardest words I will ever say on this podcast. Are we ready? The first is gemmen, oh god, I'm gonna try again, okay. Je, one more time, gemmen schafften geef full. Probably butchered it, but it's a German word. It means the psychological health that follows from caring about others.
8:52 Jemma Sbeg? And the next word is bodhisattva. It's a Buddhist notion. Um, that somebody who is fulfilled is somebody who strives for compassion towards others. Apologies if I got those wrong. I don't know, I can, I can never get my way around complex words. And my Australian accent makes it so hard to ever do anything that is not just like brutal, simple English. But this, this idea of self-transcendence, of bodhisattva, of, I'm not even gonna try the German one. Is something that textbooks don't include. I've never seen this spoken about, at least when I was studying psychology. Essentially, and I'm, I'm really drilling this point home because I think, I just think it's such an important point.
9:36 Jemma Sbeg? It's all fine and great to self-actualize, but what do you even do with that? Like, can you truly be fulfilled as an accomplished individual alone in your ivory tower? If you are not connected to other people? And if you do not have empathy for other people that drives you to connect with them and give on to them and be kind to them. That, to Maslow, was the most enlightened psychological state. So that's one thing people don't know about Maslow's hierarchy of needs. There is actually another special bonus layer, another thing we need to achieve. The other thing we often get wrong is that, drumroll please, Maslow actually never
10:19 Jemma Sbeg? displayed or articulated his hierarchy as a pyramid.
10:24 Jemma Sbeg? He very rarely even referred to it as a hierarchy. According to the psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman, who actually took on Maslow's unpublished work and made it his mission to expand upon these theories. This pyramid depiction that we are so familiar with was actually created by management consultants who were trying to sell a particular interpretation of the model. This depiction, Kaufman argues, actually, he says it's done a great disservice to Maslow's original theory. It's really simplified it. In an article by the British Psychological Society, they speak about how the pyramid depiction suggests that our journey towards self-actualization, self-transcendence operates
11:09 Jemma Sbeg? almost like a video game. And it kind of leads people to assume that you level up in life by unlocking the door from one layer to the next, to the next, to the next. Maslow's conceptualization was that each cluster of needs, your social needs, your esteem needs, your survival needs are interdependent and they have to be experienced simultaneously. The hierarchy, it needs to be viewed in an integrated way. That is, each cluster of needs rests upon each other, not in a consecutive way, but in like a circular way. The other thing this pyramid depiction doesn't explain well is how people can be at different
11:54 Jemma Sbeg? stages without every single stage before it being entirely a hundred percent fulfilled. For example, people who don't necessarily feel like they have great social support, who are maybe really lonely, aren't connected to a family unit or even to a community, can still go on and make amazing art and care for others and reach those peaks of self-actualization and self-transcendence, even though their social needs from the outside don't seem to be being met, you know? People who may not have enough food to eat, who are struggling with poverty, still experience deep meaning, still have respect for themselves. You can kind of see how this pyramid idea gets really tricky in that it gate keeps
12:38 Jemma Sbeg? higher, more purposeful functioning for only the rich, healthy, the happy, the loved.
12:45 Jemma Sbeg? And we know that's not the case. And Maslow didn't want us to think that that was the case, that you can only achieve this high, high point if everything is going right in your life. And if like you are a certain type of individual who does not suffer, has not suffered, has all their needs available to them. I think that's a big issue I take with Maslow's hierarchy is again, that it can gatekeep certain, you know, higher, again, I said higher, but you know, certain seemingly more enlightened forms of functioning for people who have it all together or who have had life handed to them in a way that was already all together. And you know, if you're experiencing poverty, if you're lonely, well, you haven't achieved that layer.
13:30 Jemma Sbeg? So there's no possible way that you can be self-actualized. There's no possible way that you can self-transcend and care for others when we kind of know that's not true. Well, we don't kind of know, like we do know. So that's another kind of myth or misconception about Maslow's hierarchy, the very fact that it is not a pyramid. He thought of it as more circular. Let's now turn to the next misconception, the next hidden part of history to do with Maslow's theory, and perhaps the least reported of them all. Maslow was in fact not the original creator of this theory of human flourishing. He wasn't even the second. He wasn't even the third. He just gave it a name. He was just the person who made it popular.
14:15 Jemma Sbeg? Maslow's hierarchy was actually inspired by the people of the Blackfoot Nation, a Native American tribe. I think they're in Montana, they're in Canada. So in the 1930s, mid 1930s, Maslow went to this place called Sikseka. It's like the largest reserve of the Blackfoot Nation and he spent six months living there, observing their social hierarchy. He kind of learnt their language. More specifically, he learnt about a way of life they had, which doesn't have an English word, didn't have one then, doesn't have one now. But when we compare it to Maslow's theory. It looks very similar. He was deeply inspired by what he saw. According to information from the University of Alberta, the Blackfoot model
14:59 Jemma Sbeg? actually was structured as the inverse to Maslow's eventual theory. So for them, the base was self-actualization. In their view, we are each born into the world as a spark of divinity with a greater purpose embedded in us. After we're born, belonging occurs as like the tribe is there to love and care for us. And through that love is how we then receive basic survival needs and basic survival resources. You know, it's how we get food, it's how we get safety, it's how we get security, it's how we tend to those needs. We then from all that achieve community actualization or self-transcendence or community transcendence. Because due to this system, we're able to support everybody, people contribute back to the community.
15:43 Jemma Sbeg? And that leads to something bigger that isn't even in Maslow's model, but is still so crucial, which is something called cultural perpetuity. Each member of the tribe, they say, is one day going to be gone. So passing on knowledge and passing on a deep truth about how the community operates and how people take care of each other. And in order to maintain harmony, that is the ultimate goal. So that like, so that the the community, the family, the culture, the society endures. I don't know, I never learnt that when I was, I never learnt anything about that when I was studying this originally. And I feel like it is such a, it's, it's quite sad that that's not included because I think, I think almost their theory
16:28 Jemma Sbeg? is a little bit better than Maslow's. It kind of makes more sense to me. So I'll go into this a little bit further about how this kind of came to be buried in the history books. So Maslow originally arrived in Sissika to explore a different theory. And that was his theory of social dominance and how order is maintained in society through different means like violence, punishment, shame. But instead, as his diaries and records, which were produced by the University of Montana show, he kind of just, he discovered something he didn't think he was going to see. He discovered astounding level Of cooperation, minimal inequality, restorative justice, full bellies, high levels of life satisfaction, as they say. He estimated that eighty to ninety percent of the Blackfoot tribe had a quality of self-esteem
17:13 Jemma Sbeg? that was only found in five to ten percent of his population. And that's when he came up with this idea, like, look at what these people have and look at what they can achieve. These people are self-actualizing because all of these needs are being taken care of with and through the community. He also witnessed a giveaway ceremony while he was there that is said to inspire, have inspired his idea of self-transcendence. So during the giveaway, this is like a big ceremony in Sissika. Members of the tribe arranged their teepees in a circle and they publicly piled up all that they had collected over the past year. And those with the most possessions, you know, told stories of how they found them, how they amassed them, how they made them.
17:58 Jemma Sbeg? And then they gave every last thing away to people who needed it more. And to Maslow, that was self-transcendence. This community had reached a point where personal artifacts, personal things didn't matter anymore if the community, if the community was suffering, if the community was in need, what is the point of personal possessions? I think this is the most important thing in this episode because Maslow himself, as far as we know, did not shy away from speaking about this. He was, I, I think according to records from what I've seen, very open that like this is where the idea came from. It really inspired him. But according to researchers, the American and the Canadian government buried the Blackfoot roots of Maslow's theory because they didn't want it to elevate a positive narrative about these people.
18:43 Jemma Sbeg? It was only really rediscovered, not so much rediscovered, but republicized after Maslow died, some fifty years later, when someone went to write a book on his life and they went to the Smithsonian archives. And then they went to Maslow's daughter, who essentially gave them permission to excavate his hidden archival box. And as they were looking through it, they found all these entries and all these accounts and all these early theoretical ideas from his time there that would become his theory of human motivation seven years later, which is the birthplace of the, now we know as, the hierarchy of needs.
19:22 Jemma Sbeg? This is so important to know and to share, especially, especially since psychology has so many underlying issues as an increasingly, but also historically white, westernized discipline. Here we have an example of a core concept, a core theory, one that millions of people know about, that was directly informed and based on the teachings and cultural harmony of a Native American group. And it's a theory they don't get credit for. Only the man who named it does. I found out about this a few years ago, actually, for the first time, thanks to a listener of the podcast, and it's just kind of stuck with me ever since. So I'm really glad that we get to talk about it today, and it's, you know, perfect timing to do a full episode on this.
20:06 Jemma Sbeg? With that in mind, and I would really, really encourage you to go and look at this more. There's a bunch of, a bunch of like really interesting historical accounts available at like the University of Montana website, University of Alberta website, that goes through all of his diaries and all of that. And there's also a lot of just like personal accounts from back then of people who were there when he was writing the theory that, yeah, it's just really interesting to, to dig into. But with that in mind, let's move on to the final myth of Maslow's so-called hierarchy, and that is that it is universally applicable, or even further, that it has strong empirical evidence that makes it a reliable and valid framework.
20:46 Jemma Sbeg? The truth is, Maslow's hierarchy is not that scientifically supported, even if it is really, really popular. And I wanted to include this at the very end, after talking about where he got the theory from, because it shows that his methods of coming up with stealing, getting inspired by whatever you want to call it, were not scientific, even if they produced something that a lot of us relate to. It was entirely derived from his own personal observations and personal anecdotes and the knowledge of a specific people. And he never tested it, not once in a proper scientific setting. All of his ideas that, you know, we have these five needs and five needs only now
21:30 Jemma Sbeg? six, that we need to complete them all in order to fulfill others, that self-actualization and self-transcendence is accessible to everybody. And that people even get a sense or a feeling from it that it's even impactful, not examined, not really investigated. Since his death, researchers have found little to no evidence for the validity of the five need hierarchy. One of the most frequently cited reviews came from Bridgewater and Waba in nineteen seventy six. They reviewed studies based on his theory and stated, the literature review shows that Maslow's need hierarchy theory of human
22:10 Jemma Sbeg? motivation has received little clear or consistent support from the available research findings. Some of Maslow's propositions are totally rejected, whilst others receive mixed and questionable support at best, which is a crazy statement for a theory that has been taught in schools and psychology labs and classrooms and offices for decades at this point. But there you go. It may not even be true. Now, in his defense, Maslow never promoted his theory to be a final truth on human flourishing. He was honestly just writing, speculating. He was interested
22:51 Jemma Sbeg? in this and something stuck. But it's interesting to see how many of those original theories he had and original ideas that he did take from the Blackfoot Nation have been taken out of context now in the modern day. I still think it's a nice idea. I still think it does provide a promise or a path to how we could provide for people and how society should and can operate and how we should take care of others. But does it deserve its position as one of the most famous theories of psychology? I don't know. Let me know what you think down below. That's all I have for you. As I said, it's a bonus episode. I always do these bonus episodes and I end up speaking for like thirty, forty minutes, but that is not the intention. We're trying to keep these short and
23:36 Jemma Sbeg? short and sweet. So let me know what your thoughts are. Let me know if there, if you think there is a better theory out there, better than Maslow's, let me know if you were surprised to learn anything in this episode, or if you have further Context or information about this that I may have missed. As I said, I actually didn't know a lot of this until a listener reached out to me a couple of years ago and corrected something that I'd said in an episode. And I'm very grateful for that because it sent me down this really interesting path and I got to learn so much. So if there's anything else you want to contribute, I would love to hear from you in the comment section below on Spotify, or you can DM me if you're listening elsewhere on Instagram at that psychology podcast. Also,
24:17 Jemma Sbeg? a reminder, we are now on Netflix. If you want to watch full episodes of the psychology of your twenties, not this episode, though, because our bonus episodes are just for people who listen to the audio podcast, the OGs, as I would say. We also have a Substack and just so much else going along and going on, not going along, going on down in the episode description. So head there if you want to learn more, find us, do anything really. But until next time, I hope you enjoyed the episode. Give me any ideas of what you want me to debunk next. I would love to do it for you. Be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself. We will talk very, very soon.
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