Abraham Maslow - Dominance/Security and Self- Actualization

Maslow: Early Influences

• Personal

  • Parental Influences

    • Parents uneducated

    • Dad: loved whiskey, women, and fighting

      • Abraham “unloved and unlovable”

    • Mom: Not nice

      • Abusive: Killed kittens

      • “God will strike you dead”

        • » Lead to scientific testing

  • Antisemitism

    • Led to few friends

    • Joined a gang

  • LACK OF CONFIDENCE

    • Wanted to go to Cornell, but lacked confidence to apply

    • Went to City College and did poorly

    • Finally went to University of Wisconsin and found love of psychology

• Education

  • Experimental Psychology: Worked with Harlow working with Monkeys

    • “Dominance Feeling”

  • Saw that dominance was less due to physical force, but came from within

  • Studied this in humans via conversational probing

    • Intense interview

    • High dominance (or security): Less religious, extroverted, and unconventional

    • Low dominance: Anxious, jealous, and easily embarrassed

• Job

  • Got a job at Brooklyn College and worked with two important people in his life

    • Max Wertheimer (Psychologist)

    • Ruth Benedict (Anthropologist)

Key Ideas

• Motivational factors underlie personality

  • Refers to how people are propelled towards goals

  • Goes beyond physiological drives (from hunger to security, esteem)

  • Sought by all humans

• Hierarchy of Needs

  • Physiological

  • Safety

  • Belongingness and love

  • Esteem

  • Self-Actualization

Physiological Needs

• The lowest level of the hierarchy

  • Food, water, sleep, and sex

• Needs that are dominant at a particular time are known as prepotent needs

  • Sleep or thirst may be prepotent but after drinking/sleeping, they are no longer . . .

Safety Needs

• Safe situations

  • Infants/children like “known situations”

    • Cry under novel situations (loud noises, strange animals, parental quarrels, etc)

  • War, disease, natural catastrophes, crime waves, etc. all bring about safety needs

  • OCD often represents a need for order, to maintain the “known,” or safety

    • Maximize safety at expense of higher-order needs

Belongingness and Love Needs

• Need to give AND receive love, both in one’s community (belongingness) as well as with individuals (love)

  • According to Maslow, this is the most frequent source of maladjustment

• Sex is represented here as well as in physiological needs

Esteem Needs

• Need for self-respect as well as the respect of others

  • Must be based on truths about ourselves, not fabrications

• If these needs are not met, then we feel inferior

Self-Actualization

• D-Needs (Deficit Needs)

• B-Needs (Being-Needs) for self actualization

• B-Values or “metamotives”

• D-Needs/B-Needs

D-Needs (Deficit Needs)

• First 4 require fulfillment of needs to avoid physical or psychological illness

B-Needs (Being-Needs) for self-actualization

• Must achieve partial satisfaction of all needs:

  • Spontaneous

  • Hard-working

  • Ethical, with strong values

  • Independent

  • Have deep relationships

B-Values or “metamotives”

• For people who attain self-actualization

• B-values are cognitive needs to know, explain, understand, and satisfy big constructs

  • Truth, godliness, justice, playfulness

“What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization”

D-Needs/B-Needs

• We experience things differently based on where we are in the hierarchy

• Love

  • D-Needs

    • Often experience jealousy and anxiety

  • B-Needs

    • Nonpossessive and completely enjoyable

Peak Experiences

• More likely in self-actualizers

• Intense and mystical experiences

• Feel powerful and get lost in a sense of time

• Experience a sense of wonderment, awe, and deep thought

After-Effects of peak experiences

• Change a person’s view:

  • of themselves in a healthy direction – more positive, secure, and confident

  • of other people and their relationships to them . . . But always in a more realistic way

  • of the world, usually by seeing worldwide problems more realistically

• Releases them for greater creativity, spontaneity, and expressiveness

• Remembers experience very positively; wants to repeat it over and over again

• More likely to view life as worthwhile

  • Beauty, excitement, honesty, goodness, truth, and meaningfulness DO exist!

Self-Actualization

• Took notes on his two role-models (Wertheimer and Benedict)

• “I realized in one wonderful moment that their two patterns could be generalized. I was talking about a kind of person, not about 2 non-comparable individuals. There was wonderful excitement in this. I tried to see whether this pattern could be found elsewhere, and I did in one person after another.”

• Started “Good Human Being” notebook

• Started collecting data at Brooklyn College (appearance, security score, Rorschach, intense interview):

• By 1945, he had developed a list of characteristics of self-actualized people . . .

Characteristics of Self-Actualized Individuals

• Clear perceptions of reality

• Acceptance of self, others, and reality

• Spontaneous and natural

• Problem-focused; have a mission

• Independent thinking

• Creative

• Have “peak experiences”

• Feels kinship with society

• Deep, but few, relationships

• Strong and clear ethics

• Unhostile sense of humor

• Resists cultural molding

Self Actualized Persons: Imperfections

• Unexpectedly ruthless with honesty

• Occasionally absent-minded

• Overkind to a fault

• Boring or lacking in humor

• Anxious at times

Examples of Self-Actualized Persons

• Max Wertheimer

• Ruth Benedict

• Eleanor Roosevelt

• George Washington Carver

Measurement and Research on Self-Actualization

• Maslow did not develop a formal assessment of his theoretical concepts

  • Measurement was mostly based on observation and one-on-one interviews

    • Conversational probing

• Shostrom developed the Personal Orientation Inventory

  • 150 question inventory

  • Two primary scores

    • Inner-Directed Supports

      • D-Needs

    • Time Competence

      • B-Needs

      • Independent, having a mission, new conceptualizations of the world

Research: Pro-Maslow

• Graham and Balloun surveyed a cross-section of a community

  • Higher needs were judged as less satisfied relative to lower needs

  • For all ages, self-actualization increased with age (except for oldest cohort)

Research: Con-Maslow

• Coles

  • Persons in dire economic situations seem to often function at higher levels of the hierarchy

  • Nazi concentration camps

    • Sense of purpose, community, ethics

  • People commit suicide

  • Soldiers die for political reasons

Applications of Maslow’s Theory

• Growth Centers

• Work

• Religion

Applications of Maslow’s Theory: Growth Centers

• Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California

  • Strove to provide D-needs

  • The opportunity for B-Needs

    • Explored ethics, creativity, hard-work, problem-solving, and the community

Applications of Maslow’s Theory: Work

• Corporate leaders, as found by I/O psychologists, rank higher on hierarchy

• Confound: Age and $$$

Applications of Maslow’s Theory: Religion

• Opposed to dogmatic views

• Must be true to oneself and explore own ethics