Why Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs Matters

Maslow's Hierarchy, (or Pyramid), of Needs is one of the central ideas in modern economics and sociology. The work of a once little-known American psychologist, it has grown into an indispensable guide to understanding the modern world. This film explains who Maslow was, what his pyramid is, and why it matters so much.

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CREDITS

Produced in collaboration with:

Mike Booth

Title animation produced in collaboration with

Vale Productions

[TheBurgessNetwork]

I first learned about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs when I went to grad school to study business and finance. It changed my life because it changed the way I SAW my life. My parents are survivors. They felt as long as I had the basics (food, clothing, shelter, health insurance) everything is fine. When it was time for me to go out into the "real world" they said, find a job that provides a retirement plan, health insurance and enough money to buy a house and a car. I wanted to be a filmmaker. Nope - they said filmmaking is for rich, white men - not for a poor, black woman.

I asked, once you have the basics covered, what is the point? What is the reason to keep living, using up the Earth's natural resources (like water), and not committing suicide? Seriously. There is a difference between surviving and living a fulfilling life. Before grad school, I knew I wanted to live, not just survive. I was once angry with my parents, but I forgave them because I realized only a self-actualized person can raise and support a self-actualized child. That's why it took me until my late 20s going to grad school to learn about this pyramid. Money makes the world go around so you need it to cover the basics (rent, food, etc). I always understood that. But everyone's ultimate goal should be financial freedom and self-actualization - no matter how long it takes to get there.

[ossen]

*It's hard to care about virtue and humility when a person is hungry in every aspect of life.*

[luisespanola]

Luxury lifestyle brands and social media companies hit esteem and self-actualization needs pretty well, however, they give only but shadows of those needs – a false sense of self-esteem and self-actualization.

[oIJustForFunIo]

Sad thing is: Most people try to educate children by denying them the fulfillment of their needs. This results in humans who are very uncertain about the love they deserve and the amount of love they really own. I really hope we somehow learn to bypass this strategy of conditioning and enable our children to live to their full potential.

[parthnagda]

During Maslow's time, his country was still a developing one and the people could not afford to move up their needs.
" To be able to worry about meaning of life, is truly a luxury"

[llewellyn]

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs explains the best day of my life.

Walking down a quiet street one day, I had a most profound 'stop and smell the roses' experience. Suddenly the natural world appeared so much more beautiful then ever before, and an overwhelming appreciation for the miracle of life followed. I was taught Maslow's Hierarchy in high school and related my experience to having reached self-actualisation.
Wishing that everyone has the opportunity to experience this in their lifetime, peace and love to all :)

[euthyphro]

One problem with the hierarchy, researchers found, is that people often seek these needs in a different order that Maslow proposes (Maslow would say higher needs do not appear until lower needs are met).

Maslow also wrote a book called, "Towards a Psychology of Being, " which serves as a sequel to the hierarchy of needs: It defines what self-actualization actually is. One thing Maslow says in the book, is that many psychological disorders appear when the hierarchy isn't met, and that the disorder disappears once certain needs are met (He says a large body of research shows this).

One more interesting thing Maslow says, which was probably inspired by Taoism. He says seeing people as need-fulfillers can make us hostile to others when we see they are not fulfilling our needs. Behavior people have unrelated to our needs might anger or annoy us. We also only focus-like tunnel vision-on what people do to satisfy our needs, and not see the other person holistically. In contrast, Self-Actualized people see other people as they are, holistically, and do not feel they "need" the other person, yet can still love/admire/respect them for their whole person. Maslow adds more to the difference between need-deficient love and Self-Actualized love. Edit: Self-Actualized people tend to feel both need-deficient love and Self-Actualized love, (Maslow says both kinds of love are needed for a good social relationship).

[elibu]

"The School of Life" is Maslow's dream come true ;-)

[zoalerix]

Guys remember this is an idea to get you thinking and do not blindly accept ideas of how your life is supposed to be. This is a fantastic realization by Maslow and he makes great points. I have been studying self development for 6 years, and this is congruent.

[virvisquevir]

"Man does not live by bread alone."

[Toshineko]

I first learned about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs when I read about how to write character motivations. I learned that if one of our human needs goes missing, then we would get driven to do anything to get that human need back. This theory would not only help in helping writers to create characters, but also make them relatable and likable.

[zzulm]

Meeting our needs can help with anxiety. I would get anxiety when my need for safety wasn't met. And when I took small breaks and deep breaths it got better. Also, self respect is honoring our needs.

[kbtken]

I always thought of the chart as a road rather than a triangle. When basic survival is right in front of you, self actualization always seems far away. Also if you are distracted into looking down at the ground in front of you, you are no longer looking down the road to where you should be headed

[Polyskill]

Maslow’s theory is my most favourite in deed. I wish everyone must chew it and would understand it. I can speak hours to discuss it correlating to every socio-economic tier.

[ThumpinglyGood]

FULL TRANSCRIPT: One of the most legendary ideas in the history of psychology Is located in an unassuming triangle Divided into 5 sections referred to universally simply as ‘Maslow's pyramid of needs’. This profoundly influential pyramid first saw the world in an academic Journal in the United States in 1943 where it was crudely drawn in black and white and surrounded by dense and jargon-rich text. It has since become a mainstay of psychological analyses, business presentations and TED talks – and grown ever more colourful and emphatic in the process. The pyramid was the work of 35-year-old Jewish psychologist Of Russian origins called Abraham Maslow, who had been looking, since the start of his professional career for nothing less than the meaning of life. No longer part of the Close-knit orthodox family of his youth, Maslow wanted to find out what could make life purposeful for people (himself included) in modern-day America a country where the pursuit of money And fame seemed to have eclipsed anymore interior or authentic aspirations.
He saw Psychology as the discipline that would enable him to answer the yearnings and questions that people had once taken to religion. He suddenly saw that human beings could be said to have essentially five different kinds of need: on the one hand, the psychological or what one could term, without any mysticism being meant by the word, the spiritual and on the other, the material. For Maslow, we all start with a set of utterly non-negotiable and basic physiological needs, for food, water, warmth and rest. In addition, we have urgent safety needs for bodily security and protection from attack. But then we start to enter the spiritual domain. We need belongingness and love. We need friends and lovers; we need esteem and respect. And Lastly, and most grandly, we are driven by what Maslow called – in a now legendary term – an urge for self-actualization: a vast touchingly nebulous, and yet hugely apt concept involving what Maslow described as ‘living according to one's full potential’ and ‘becoming who we really are’. Part of the reason why the description of these needs, laid out in pyramid form has, proved so persuasive is their capacity to capture, with elemental simplicity, a profound structural truth about human existence. Maslow was putting his finger, with unusual deftness and precision, on a set of answers to very large questions that tend to confuse and perplex us viciously, particularly when we are young, namely: What are we really after? What do we long for? And how do we arrange our priorities and give and give due regard for the different and competing claims we have on our attention? Maslow was reminding us with artistic concision of the shape of an ideal well-lived life, proposing at once that we cannot live by our spiritual callings alone, but also that it cannot be right to remain focused only on the material either. We need, to be whole, both the material and the spiritual realms to be attended to, the base lending support while the summit offers upward direction and definition. Maslow was rebutting calls from two kinds of zealots: firstly, over-ardent spiritual types who might urge us to forget entirely about money, housing, a good insurance policy and enough to pay for lunch. But he was also fighting against extreme hard-nosed pragmatists who might imply that life was simply a bread process of putting food on the table and going to the office. Both camps had – for Maslow – misunderstood the complexity of the human animal. Unlike other creatures, we truly are multifaceted, called at once to unfurl our soul according to its inner destiny – and to make sure we'll be able to pay the bills at the end of the month. Operating at the heyday of American capitalism, Maslow was interestingly ambivalent about business. He was awed by the material resources of large corporations around him but at the same time he lamented that almost all their economic activity was – unfairly and bizarrely – focused on honouring customers’ needs at the bottom of his pyramid. America’s largest companies were helping people to have a roof over their heads, feeding them, moving them around and ensuring they could talk to each other long-distance. But they seemed utterly uninterested in trying to fulfil the essential spiritual appetites defined on the higher slopes of his pyramid. Towards the end of his long life, Maslow expressed a hope that businesses could in time learn to make more of their profits from addressing not only our basic needs but also – and as importantly – our higher spiritual and psychological ones as well. That would be truly enlightened capitalism. In the personal sphere, Maslow's pyramid remains a hugely useful object to turn to whenever we're trying to assess the direction of our lives. Often, as we reflect upon it, we start to notice that we really haven't arranged and balanced our needs as wisely and elegantly as we might. Some lives have gotten implausible wide base: all the energy seems directed towards material accumulation. At the same time, there are lives with an opposite problem, where we have not paid due heed to our need to look after our fragile and vulnerable bodies. Maslow's beautifully simple visual cue is, above anything else, a portrait of a life lived in harmony with the complexities of our nature. We should, at our less frantic moments, use it to reflect with newfound focus on what it is we might do next.

[raycole]

Maslow's Hierarchy is good for figuring out what to do next. You may wish for self-actualization, as that is the ideal, but you can't get there until your other needs are met. If you feel stuck it helps to know where exactly on the pyramid you're stuck.

[ucheunlimited]

Maslow was ahead of his time, this is one of the truest concepts in life.

[gamrkidd]

This reminds me so much of my high school psychology class with my favorite teacher ever Mr. Kochel in the year 2009 learning about Maslow‘s hierarchy of needs.. ah the good ol days though they’re not too far in the past. I’m here watching his video on my phone in my truck at work. Fulfilling several of these needs concurrently.

[swapnasunder]

I listen to this video almost every month. Every time I listen to it ...I understand something new that I can apply ...such a masterpiece!

[HumansOfVR]

*What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself*
*I'm aware that my passion is making animated videos*