The Philosophy of Maslow's Hierarchy

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When a client is struggling with financial or health needs in addition to personal or spiritual ones, it is common to make an appeal to "Maslow's hierarchy," according to which material needs, in some sense, come first. The appeal to this hierarchy is supposed to imply that we should help the client fix their financial or health needs before addressing more abstract concerns.

Maslow's hierarchy is named for the psychologist Abraham Maslow and specifically his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation." It is worth dwelling on this title. First, what Maslow proposes is a theory of motivation—an account of what drives creatures like us to act as we do. Second, Maslow proposes a theory of motivation, a hypothesis, grounded in empirical evidence, of how motivation works in creatures like us. Rather than the hierarchy of needs that we sometimes encounter, what we have is a theory of motivation. We can then ask: What is this theory, and is it true?

Understood as an account of motivation, here is roughly what the account says. It holds that individuals are driven to first satisfy the basic needs of physiology: water, food, shelter, and sleep. Only once these drives are met do individuals move to satisfy more complex concerns, such as those provided by family, country, or religion. Thus we have a picture of motivation in which strong physiological desires predominate, and more sophisticated desires come into play only once those are met.

This is an intuitive and apparently naturalistic account of human motivation. Humans are, after all, animals, and we should expect them to act as animals supposedly do: to seek their own basic needs first of all. There is a touch of harsh realism, then, to Maslow's account of motivation. It presents people not perhaps as we wish them to be, but as they are.

But consider then our second question: Is this theory actually true? There are strong reasons for thinking that it is not. We all know people who are motivated differently from this conception. People sacrifice income in order to spend more time with family. People deny necessities to themselves in order to provide luxuries to their children. People are even willing to die on behalf of their family, country, or religious faith. None of these things is compatible with a theory of motivation that gives priority to one's own physical needs.

Empirical work on motivation provides further grounds for skepticism. A widely-cited paper by psychologists Ed Diener and Louis Tay studies need-fulfillment across 123 countries, and finds at best weak support for Maslow's hierarchy. There is a tendency for people to meet basic needs before more complex and relational ones, but this tendency is a modest one and often trumped in individual cases. Crucially, whereas Maslow's hierarchy purports to be universal, these motivational exceptions often depend on local economic conditions and cultural values. For example, Diener and Tay note, in poorer countries interpersonal goods like respect are often satisfied when basic safety needs are not, although this varies from person to person since "the psychosocial needs tend to be more an individual affair."

Maslow's "hierarchy of needs" then is really a theory of human motivation, a theory that appears to have some aspects of general truth but with lots of individual exceptions, and one that posits universal motivation where in fact we find cultural motivation. If this is right, then a theory that providers appeal to all the time is in fact scientifically unsound, and those constant appeals to "Maslow's hierarchy" should be reconsidered or withdrawn.

I think this is unlikely to happen, because providers who appeal to this hierarchy are not really appealing to a scientific theory at all. Rather, they are appealing implicitly to a certain account of what is important or valuable. When a provider says that a client needs to have housing before she can focus on attending religious services, that provider is typically not appealing to a scientific theory of motivation on which people are motivated to find housing more strongly than they are motivated to seek religion—a theory which, as we have just seen, does not seem to be universally true. Rather, she is implicitly endorsing a certain theory of value: that having housing is more valuable, at least in the short and immediate term, than attending religious services.

But I think we should still be hesitant about this "hierarchy." First, because this does not in fact represent some people's motivations correctly. Some people want their extended family's well-being more than their own, or spiritual solace more than housing. Second, because there is a strong presumption in many helping professions—including social work and mental health counseling—of respecting the client's own values, and not imposing one's own. If "Maslow's hierarchy" is not a sound scientific theory, then it is an unabashedly universalist account of what is valuable. But, in fact, there is a great diversity in what people value, and the role of clinical providers should be to acknowledge and accept that diversity, rather than imposing a hierarchy that is accurate for many but false for others.

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It is curious that professions that pride themselves on a recognition of diversity and pluralism of values have also tended to accept a hierarchy of values that is universal and monolithic. We should take a more measured approach to these issues, recognizing the motivational tendencies described by Maslow, as well as the importance of helping clients to secure their material needs, while being more mindful of the diversity of human values, and the fact that, for some people, there are things more valuable than physical well-being.