In the psychology of motivation, the first question to ask is a hard one: “What motivates behavior?” The difficulty is that there are so many potential answers. People are motivated to make money, to make peace; to rise in status, to rise to heaven; to feel good about themselves, to make others feel good—or bad—about themselves. How can we bring order to the diversity of motives?

One psychologist who provided order was Abraham Maslow. He organized the diversity of human motives according to five basic needs that form a hierarchy, known as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (Maslow, 1943, 1954; Figure 11.1). A need is a necessity of life that an organism is motivated to pursue. Hierarchy means that the needs are at different levels and you have to fulfill one level before you can move up to the next.

At the lowest level of Maslow’s hierarchy are needs for biological survival, such as food, water, and sleep. If unmet, these needs become overwhelming. When your stomach grumbles or your eyelids droop, it’s not time to make friends or money; it’s time to eat or sleep.

Next are safety needs, that is, needs for protection against physical harm. These include harms that may be staring you in the face (e.g., a predator) and those you anticipate in the future (e.g., potentially losing a job and thus being unable to pay your rent).

The third need is evident from the 200 million tweets that Twitter users send every day or the more than $50 billion that Facebook Inc. is worth. People need to feel connected to others. They have social belonging needs—to be in contact and establish relationships with members of their society and to belong to social groups.

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Fourth, people need to be not only members of a group, but also valued members. People have an esteem need, according to Maslow; that is, a need to be well regarded by others.

Finally, at the highest level is a self-actualization need. Self-actualization is realizing one’s inner potential. Even successful professionals might feel they are in the wrong profession; for example, a successful lawyer might have always felt that her true calling was to be a successful artist. If so, they will feel unfulfilled. People need to “be true to their own nature” (Maslow, 1970, p. 22). To learn about this need, Maslow studied people who fulfilled it: self-actualized persons. He found that—contrary to what the word “self” may suggest—they often were concerned with the welfare of others, taking strong stands on moral and ethical issues that promoted others’ well-being.

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Maslow formulated his theory decades ago. In the years since, researchers have recognized its limitations. Some note a lack of research support for the idea that the needs form a strict hierarchy (Wahba & Bridgewell, 1976). Others suggest that Maslow paid insufficient attention to the role of cultural factors in shaping needs and their pursuit (Smith & Feigenbaum, 2013). Nonetheless, Maslow valuably reminds us of the breadth of topics that must be included in a psychology of motivation. In the remainder of this chapter, we’ll organize them as follows.

The first three sections explore biological needs, achievement needs, and social needs. We then turn to motivation and thinking processes, in a section on cognition and motivation. Next, you’ll learn about motivation in groups, including schools and work settings. Finally, we’ll move down a level of explanation: from motivational processes of the mind to their biological underpinnings in the brain.