Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

One of the well-known complaints about the limitations of economics is that economic theorizing is often based upon unquestioned assumptions about the nature of human agents. The model of homo oeconomicus has often been taken as an abstraction of human behavior in order to highlight major rules of economic functioning in a simplified way. A fundamental problem is that homo oeconomicus's underlying assumptions clash increasingly with everyday experiences by observers inspired by social sciences like psychology or sociology. According to these assumptions, human agents are isolated from social networks and they are reduced to rational calculating machines following ultimately egoistic aims of maximizing individual profit. The sterile world that operates with ideas oiâhomo oeconomicus takes motivation as granted and treats human behavior as a black box.

In contrast, the primary aim of psychology is to ask for forces, grades, and types of motivation. Abraham H. Maslow (1908–70), a psychologist, offers a systematized typology of human needs that are organized hierarchically and that operate as motivation incentives at different levels. Maslow's work has a prominent place within the academic area of psychology but is also very well known by a wide field of neighboring disciplines concerned with questions of needs and motivation. His book Motivation and Personality (1954) reads as an address not only to psychologists but also a plea to refer more systematically to a concept of meaning in science:

A psychological interpretation of science begins with the acute realization that science is a human creation, rather than an autonomous, nonhuman, or per se “thing” with intrinsic rules of its own. Its origins are in human motives, its goals are human goals, and it is created, renewed, and maintained by human beings. Its laws, organization, and articulation rests not only on the nature of the reality that it discovers, but also on the nature of the human nature that does the discovering.

Maslowinspiredanewschool of thoughtin academic psychology that tried to establish a platform beside behavioristic and psychoanalytic approaches and that was coined humanistic psychology. The approach had clear proximity to phenomenological thought and was distant to methods employing large data sets. Maslow's taxonomy of needs serves as textbook knowledge still today, and it is basic introduction in courses on management training or personal development. Initially Maslow suggested five stages of needs that were later further developed to seven and finally eight stages. The first edition of Motivation and Personality (1954) summarized Maslow's work undertaken between 1943 and 1954. Maslow's hierarchy of needs has been often misunderstood as a very strict corset by which “higher” needs only come into discussion when “lower” needs are already satisfied “but actually it is not nearly so rigid as we may have implied.”

Distinguishing between higher and lower needs means that lower needs are—anthropologically viewed—basic needs that cover physiological necessities such as getting or having food and shelter but also warmth, sexuality, and sleep. Maslow argues that even physiological needs can be ordered in a sub-hierarchy. On the other side, a higher need signals a later phyletic or evolutionary development. The need for food is shared by all living entities whereas the need for love or self-actualization is shared by fewer species. Another point is that higher needs are later ontogenetic developments.

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