33.4 A Hierarchy of Motives

“Hunger is the most urgent form of poverty.”

Alliance to End Hunger, 2002

Some needs take priority. At this moment, with your needs for air and water hopefully satisfied, other motives—such as your desire to achieve—are energizing and directing your behavior. Let your need for water go unsatisfied and your thirst will preoccupy you. Deprived of air, your thirst would disappear.

Small psychological world: Abraham Maslow was the first graduate student of the famed monkey attachment researcher, Harry Harlow. (Harlow, in turn, had been mentored at Stanford by the famed intelligence researcher, Lewis Terman.)

Abraham Maslow (1970) described these priorities as a hierarchy of needs (FIGURE 33.3). At the base of this pyramid are our physiological needs, such as those for food and water. Only if these needs are met are we prompted to meet our need for safety, and then to satisfy our human needs to give and receive love and to enjoy self-esteem. Beyond this, said Maslow (1971), lies the need to actualize one’s full potential.

Figure 33.3
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs Reduced to near-starvation by their rulers, inhabitants of Suzanne Collins’ fictional nation, Panem, hunger for food and survival. Hunger Games heroine Katniss Everdeen expresses higher-level needs for actualization and transcendence, and in the process inspires the nation.

Near the end of his life, Maslow proposed that some people also reach a level of self-transcendence. At the self-actualization level, people seek to realize their own potential. At the self-transcendence level, people strive for meaning, purpose, and communion that are transpersonal, beyond the self (Koltko-Rivera, 2006).

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Maslow’s hierarchy is somewhat arbitrary; the order of such needs is not universally fixed. People have starved themselves to make a political statement. Culture also matters: Self-esteem matters most in individualist nations, whose citizens tend to focus more on personal achievements than on family and community identity (Oishi et al., 1999). And, while agreeing with Maslow’s basic levels of need, today’s evolutionary psychologists note that gaining and retaining mates and parenting offspring are also universal human motives (Kenrick et al., 2010).

Nevertheless, the simple idea that some motives are more compelling than others provides a framework for thinking about motivation. Worldwide life-satisfaction surveys support this basic idea (Oishi et al., 1999; Tay & Diener, 2011). In poorer nations that lack easy access to money and the food and shelter it buys, financial satisfaction more strongly predicts feelings of well-being. In wealthy nations, where most are able to meet basic needs, home-life satisfaction is a better predictor.

Let’s now consider four representative motives, beginning at the physiological level with hunger and working up through sexual motivation to the higher-level needs to belong and to achieve. At each level, we shall see how experience interacts with biology.

RETRIEVAL PRACTICE

  • How do instinct theory, drive-reduction theory, and arousal theory contribute to our understanding of motivated behavior?

Instincts and evolutionary psychology help explain the genetic basis for our unlearned, species-typical behaviors. From drive-reduction theory, we know that our physiological needs (such as hunger) create an aroused state that drives us to reduce the need (for example, by eating). Arousal theory suggests we need to maintain an optimal level of arousal, which helps explain our motivation toward behaviors that meet no physiological need.

  • After hours of driving alone in an unfamiliar city, you finally see a diner. Although it looks deserted and a little creepy, you stop because you are really hungry. How would Maslow’s hierarchy of needs explain your behavior?

According to Maslow, our drive to meet the physiological needs of hunger and thirst take priority over safety needs, prompting us to take risks at times in order to eat.

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