Being an honors student and neurotic overachiever for about as long as I can remember, I’m fascinated with the concept of motivation. For me, this has never been an issue as I find myself naturally putting a great deal of effort into all of my assignments and profusely studying in order to maintain my grades. What I’m interested in is what motivates human behavior. What drives someone to keep up diligently to shoot for that A in a class while another slacks off and simply doesn’t mind earning a C? To my relief, this is thoroughly discussed in the psychological community. Today I’m going to talk about one of my favorite theories in psychology—Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

According to a humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow, human actions are motivated in order achieve certain needs. He was interesting in discovering what brings people happiness and the things they do to achieve their aims of happiness. Maslow introduced his concept of a hierarchy of needs in his 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation.” Essentially, the hierarchy suggests that people are first motivated to fulfill basic needs before they can more onto more complex, advanced needs.  A central belief to his theory was that people are born with the desire to self-actualize—meaning they want to be all they can be. Before reaching the ultimate goal of self-actualization, however, people must meet their most basic needs such as food, safety, love, and self-esteem.

As you can see above, Maslow’s hierarchy is most easily understood displayed as a pyramid. The lower levels of the pyramid display a person’s most basic needs, and the complex, harder to achieve needs are towards the top. There are five different levels:

Physiological Needs: These include everything essential for survival. Basically food, water, air and sleep. These needs are instinctive and all other needs are secondary until these primary physiological needs are reached.

Security Needs: They consist of the need for security and safety. Security needs are also critical for survival, but to a lesser extent than physiological needs. Examples include shelter from the environment, employment, a safe living environment, and health care.

Social Needs: Humans are naturally social animals. This means we thrive from interaction, belonging, love, and affection. Friendships, romantic attachments, and family relationships all fulfill this need for companionship and acceptance.

Esteem Needs: Esteem needs include the need for things that reflect on personal worth, self-esteem, social recognition, and accomplishment.

Self-Actualization: People who reach this ultimate need realize their personal potential and self-fulfillment, and they seek personal growth and peak experiences. Self-actualization is when a person essentially finds a meaning in life that is important to them. These people are fully aware of their potential and know exactly what they are capable of. While self-actualization might mean creating works of art or writing a novel for some, it could be excelling in a sport, the classroom, or even your career.

Really, self actualization is all about reaching one’s full potential. I feel like ending my final blog post of RCL on this note would be rather appropriate. Through both semesters of blogging in this class, I’ve learned a substantial amount about my fellow bloggers. From reading everyone’s various blogs each week and hearing various perspectives on different topics, I’ve realized that every single individual in this has something important to contribute. To everyone who has followed my blogs and commented on them (even though we had to), thank you. Your comments really made my friday afternoons. As freshman year is drawing to a close, I wish everyone the best of luck in their future here at Penn State, and I’m positive you all will go on to achieve great things (like reaching self-actualization?!). Stay psyched section twenty two.

Sources:

http://psychology.about.com/od/theoriesofpersonality/a/hierarchyneeds.htm