Abraham Maslow: On Motivation, Personality, & Self-Actualization​

By Charlie Huntington, M.A., Ph.D. Candidate
Abraham Maslow is a psychologist most famous for his proposed hierarchy of human needs. But there is much more to his contributions to the field of psychology.
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As an undergraduate student, I came to the somewhat cynical conclusion that some of my peers were far more invested in certain social causes than the people who were actually affected by the social injustices those peers were protesting. I thought to myself, “It’s easy to pour all this energy into a cause when you don’t have any more pressing needs to worry about.”
Although I was not yet a psychologist-in-training, I had unconsciously tapped into Abraham Maslow’s most famous idea: that our needs have a hierarchy, moving from the most fundamental and basic to the most abstract and complex. Living on our cozy, wooded college campus, my peers and I had nearly all of our needs met: We had beds to sleep in, a dining hall to eat at, and the time and space to socialize with each other. With all of those needs already met, we were free to focus most of our attention on our classes, our athletic competitions, and the social causes we cared about. I knew that the people in nearby, more economically disadvantaged towns were spending most of their time getting those basic needs met than they were protesting the state of affairs.

The ordering of human needs that can help explain that situation in my life is just one example of the intuitive contributions that Abraham Maslow made to the field of psychology. Let’s look at some more.​
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Who Is Abraham Maslow? (A Definition)​

Abraham Maslow was born in Brooklyn, New York, in the early 20th century to Jewish immigrant parents from Russia (Schott, 1992). After completing undergraduate studies at the City College of New York, he made his way to the University of Wisconsin–Madison for his doctoral studies. There he received training in the dominant psychological perspective of the time: behaviorism. After graduating, Maslow returned to New York where he continued his research and taught at several different colleges. It was not long before he began to engage with other scholars, such as Gestalt psychologists, who were actively involved in the transition from behaviorism to what became known as humanistic psychology.

Like other humanistic psychologists, Maslow would spend his career advocating for the field of psychology to see people not as a collection of neuroses or traumatic childhood experiences but instead as active agents in fulfilling their own potential (Schott, 1992). Maslow taught and conducted research at other universities in the northeastern United States, and he continued his research on self-actualization until the very end of his life, when he moved to California. He died there in 1970, only 62 years after his birth back in Brooklyn.​

Abraham Maslow’s Contributions to Psychology​

Maslow’s most famous contribution to psychology—and justly so—is his hierarchy of needs, which he developed over the course of many studies and most thoroughly described in his book Motivation and Personality (Maslow, 1954). Hos hierarchy of needs was influential because it moved the focus from people merely learning how to survive to people learning how to thrive. Instead of being creatures that are limited to coping with the world as best we can, Maslow saw humans as wanting to express the best versions of themselves through their actions. This distinction between coping behaviors and expressive behaviors was a major contribution to the field of humanistic psychology.
 
Relatedly, Maslow contributed to the field of education by offering ideas about how to incorporate humanistic beliefs into experiences of learning. He was a particular advocate of teachers joining with their students and encouraging students to study what they find intrinsically rewarding (Maslow, 1971). He saw extrinsic motivation, such as encouraging children to pursue the best grades possible, as being more about coping than about self-expression. In other words, he criticized certain educational approaches as being overly behaviorist and ignoring what he saw as our innate drive to pursue goals that align with our natural interests. Cultivating this innate drive, he reasoned, would be more aligned with the goal of self-actualization.

Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has five categories that move from our most powerful and primitive needs to our most complex and least “necessary” needs (Maslow, 1954). These categories, in that order, are physiological needs, safety and security, belongingness, esteem, and self-actualization. Physiological needs are the things we won’t survive without: shelter, food and water, the ability to keep ourselves warm or cool ourselves off. Safety and security reflect our need to avoid harm to our bodies and to be able to walk around without fearing that others will harm us. The third need is our desire to belong; everybody wants to feel that they have other people who care about them and will stick by them. The fourth need, esteem, is the need to feel good about ourselves and to have other people like us as well. The final need, self-actualization, is the need to be engaged in meaningful activities in our lives—ideally, things that are personally meaningful.
 
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has been extremely influential, but these concepts are not always straightforward to measure (Lester, 2013). This may be because people regularly choose to prioritize these needs “out of order.” For example, some competitive endurance athletes deprive themselves of food in order to maximize their athletic performance (prioritizing the goal of self-actualization), and plenty of nonathletes do the same because they want to belong in a particular peer group or to be esteemed by others for their skinniness.  

Video: Abraham Maslow & Self-Actualization

Abraham Maslow on Motivation and Personality

Maslow (2019) rejected the notion, as promoted by behaviorism, that people are primarily motivated by their most basic needs. Instead, he thought that people are often motivated by multiple goals at once and that these goals are often abstract and relatively unclear to us. We are influenced by the hierarchy of needs, but we don’t consciously think in this way.
 
Suppose it’s a Friday night and you are invited by your friend at work to join them and a few other coworkers for dinner and drinks. You have the same motivating factors—the same hierarchy of needs—as everyone else, but which needs are most important to you in that moment would reflect the particular personality you have developed over your lifetime. So depending on who you are, you might say yes, because eating out with friends will satisfy your needs for nourishment, belonging, and self-esteem, or you might decline, because you would rather recover from the workweek on your own and work on a passion project at home.​

Abraham Maslow and Self-Actualization

To Maslow, self-actualization is the most complex and uniquely human motive or need there is (Maslow, 1954). It is the full realization of who you are meant to be as a human being. When all our more basic needs are satisfied, Maslow argued that we naturally turn our attention to expressing ourselves in all of our own uniqueness. The satisfaction of this need is pretty specific to each individual. For my part, I know that when all my other needs are satisfied, I want to be out exercising in nature, playing music, or having meaningful experiences with friends where I get to know them better. These might be the closest I get to moments of self-actualization.
 
For a deeper dive on Maslow’s theory of self-actualization, I recommend watching this video:

Video: Abraham Maslow and the Psychology of Self-Actualization​

The Birth and Death of Abraham Maslow

Maslow was born on April 1, 1908. At first, his Russian-Jewish parents raised him in a mostly Jewish neighborhood, but they soon moved to a non-Jewish neighborhood. Between the negative attention he received in this neighborhood and family difficulties at home, it was almost inevitable that Maslow would end up spending lots of time in the local library and working hard at his schoolwork (DeCarvalho, 1991). It is possible that these negative experiences, along with the frustration he experienced with psychology’s traditional focus on psychological problems, were the main motivating factors in his embracing of humanistic psychology with its focus on human flourishing. After decades of contributing to humanistic psychology from his faculty positions in New York, Boston, and California, Maslow died of a heart attack while out jogging near Stanford University.

Abraham Maslow’s Humanistic Theory

For Maslow, like other humanistic psychologists, psychology was meant to focus on people as having autonomy, dignity, self-responsibility, and the ability to be virtuous and kind to each other (Pearson & Podeschi, 1999). Instead of seeing people as full of psychopathology, he saw them as able to better themselves and their environments, discovering their real selves in the process.

Abraham Maslow’s Management Theory

Maslow (1954) also attempted to bring humanistic psychology and his own psychological research into the realm of organizational psychology—the psychology of businesses and other institutions created by humans. His perspective was guided by his belief that an organization that encouraged self-actualization would achieve the highest levels of productivity and worker happiness. He argued that a company that tried to bring out the best selves of its workers would be more successful than a company that focused primarily on productivity or profit.
 
In alignment with this perspective, Maslow (1998) made many suggestions for reframing effective leadership in organizations. First and foremost, he wanted management to assume the best of its workers, to look for their potential wherever possible, and to give them an experience of being invested in the company’s mission. He thought that if everybody rallied around the goal of what is best for the organization, rather than for any individual’s ego, the organization would thrive. At the same time, if a company could align each employee’s sense of self-interest with the company’s self-interest, it would create a highly harmonious workplace. Finally, Maslow drew inspiration from the communal nature of Native communities in the United States, noting that they achieved a better harmony of individual and tribal success than did many organizations.

Abraham Maslow Quotes

Here are just a few of the many insightful comments Maslow made on human nature. They reflect his humanistic approach and criticisms of behaviorism, his faith in human potential and optimism about human nature.
​
  • “We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.”
  • “The good or healthy society would then be defined as one that permitted people's highest purposes to emerge by satisfying all their basic needs.”
  • “Let people realize clearly that every time they threaten someone or humiliate or unnecessarily hurt or dominate or reject another human being, they become forces for the creation of psychopathology, even if these be small forces. Let them recognize that every person who is kind, helpful, decent, psychologically democratic, affectionate, and warm is a psychotherapeutic force, even though a small one.”
  • “When people appear to be something other than good and decent, it is only because they are reacting to stress, pain, or the deprivation of basic human needs such as security, love, and self-esteem.”
  • “One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.”
  • “Self-actualizing people are those who have come to a high level of maturation, health, and self-fulfillment . . . the values that self-actualizers appreciate include truth, creativity, beauty, goodness, wholeness, aliveness, uniqueness, justice, simplicity, and self-sufficiency.”
  • “All of life is education and everybody is a teacher and everybody is forever a pupil.”

Articles Related to Abraham Maslow

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Books Related to Abraham Maslow

If you’d like to keep learning more, here are a few books that you might be interested in.

Final Thoughts on Abraham Maslow​

Perhaps the best way to summarize Maslow’s contributions is to say he pushed back against the prevailing psychology of behaviorism by offering his own novel ideas grounded in humanistic psychology (DeCarvalho, 1991). While behaviorism told people that they were at the mercy of their environments and the reinforcement they received from others, Maslow believed that people do much more than just cope with their environments: They express themselves through interacting with their environments with agency and purpose. They exercise free will in the pursuit of meeting increasingly complex needs. These actions must be rewarding in some way because we keep doing them, right? Maslow offered a compelling explanation for how we are more than the sum of our behaviors.

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