What Maslow Got Wrong
Richard Sedlmayr and James Walsh
In 1972, a plane crashed high in the Andes. After consuming what little provisions they could find in the wreckage while waiting for rescue, the survivors started to eat the bodies of the deceased.
The late psychologist Abraham Maslow would have had an easy time making sense of this. He conceived the “hierarchy of needs,” which is usually presented in the form of a pyramid along these lines:
Maslow (1943) argued that “a person who is lacking food, safety, love, and esteem would most probably hunger for food more strongly than for anything else.” He continued:
All other needs may become simply non-existent or be pushed into the background. It is then fair to characterize the whole organism by saying simply that it is hungry, for consciousness is almost completely preempted by hunger.”
This conjures a disturbing image: we can imagine how, high up on that glacier in the Andes, human values like dignity or honor got overpowered by raw hunger as the survivors succumbed to a savage frenzy.
But that is not at all how the survivors report their experiences:
“We all gathered inside the fuselage. It was late afternoon and the light was dim. Roberto began to speak. “We are starving,” he said simply. “Our bodies are consuming themselves. Unless we eat some protein soon, we will die, and the only protein here is in the bodies of our friends... If you want to see your families again, this is what you must do.
“I knew that my body would use the protein to strengthen itself and slow the process of starvation. That night, for the first time since we’d crashed, I felt a small flickering of hope... as a group, we had made a declaration to the mountain that we would not surrender, and for myself, I knew that in a small, sad way, I had taken my first step back toward my father.
“I turned every tortured moment, every labored breath, into an act of love for him. My love sustained me, moment by moment, and miraculously those moments turned into the path that led me back to him.”
In the survivors’ own telling, they were in no way reduced to wild animals. And in a testament to their agency, they ultimately managed to escape their dire situation by drawing on resources beyond protein – including, in the example above, a son’s love for his father. If even people in such extreme circumstances did not lose their consciousness and humanity, are there any circumstances where Maslow’s hierarchy applies?
It sure isn’t well-suited to make sense of poverty. Popular imagery often portrays people in poverty as clawing at the base of Maslow’s pyramid. These narratives give the impression that such people lack psychological needs. But nothing could be further from the case.
Take the need to belong. Writing on the economic lives of the poor, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo ask the rhetorical question: Why don’t the poor eat more? Poring over data from household surveys, here is what they observe:
“Spending on festivals is an important part of the budget for many extremely poor households. In Udaipur, over the course of the previous year, more than 99 percent of the extremely poor households spent money on a wedding, a funeral, or a religious festival. The median household spent 10 percent of its annual budget on festivals. In South Africa, 90 percent of the households living under $1 per day spent money on festivals. In Pakistan, Indonesia, and Côte d’Ivoire, more than 50 percent did likewise.”
According to this story, even people facing extreme material deprivation invest a non-trivial portion of their limited resources in meeting their psychological needs. This suggests that we need to update our model of basic needs - with psychological needs operating alongside material needs.
To say that “belonging isn’t a basic need because humans need food more urgently” is akin to saying that “food isn’t a basic need because humans need oxygen more urgently.” To function properly, we need oxygen and food - and a sense of belonging. We also need, for example, the sense that we are competent at understanding and controlling our lives, as experiences that erode these beliefs are a recipe for mental disorder and suicide.
Why has Maslow’s theory proven so intuitive? One explanation is the widespread tendency to discount the psychological needs of people facing material deprivation. Experimental evidence has shown that we tend to demean the psychological needs of historically stigmatized groups, such as drug addicts, in much the same way we do animals. In other words, we are prone to dehumanizing the poor.
This can obviously interfere with our judgment about how to unlock people’s potential to flourish. In one study, donors presumed that homeless people would value their material needs much more highly than their psychological needs, but homeless peoples’ own choices and self-reports suggest that isn’t the case at all. Let’s avoid dehumanizing people, especially if we are in the business of human development. If you can’t forget the famous pyramid, perhaps consider replacing it with this:
