Human needs are hierarchical: physiological, safety, belonging, esteem, self-actualization.
Studies of the ordering have not supported it — people pursue esteem and belonging while hungry, and Maslow drew no pyramid. It survives in management training rather than in psychology.
In practice
- A worker on an insecure contract presses for a job title and worries about the rent in the same week, and neither waits for the other.
- Maslow never drew a pyramid — that came from a 1960s management textbook, which is why the diagram is more confident than the theory.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation for its durability is that it organises a real observation, that urgent physical needs crowd out other concerns. Another is presentational: the pyramid, which Maslow never drew, is easy to teach and remember.
- In its favour
- Cross-national survey work finds the needs themselves close to universal and each associated with wellbeing.
- Against it
- The same work finds no strict ordering, since people pursue belonging and esteem while basic needs are unmet, and the original evidence was Maslow's reading of biographies rather than measurement.
- Standing
- Studies of the ordering have not supported it, and Maslow never drew it as a pyramid.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- Theories of the mind, from the lab to the bookshop