This concept is important to any university student, but it has particular meaning to students of the mass media and mass communication. What motivates people? Why do they so readily to media content involving sex and violence today and so reluctantly to an educational program, a symphony performance or a documentary on the challenges involved in climbing the highest mountain? Maslow can help you better understand that reality...and yourself.

Abraham Maslow's motivational model

Abraham Maslow developed the Hierarchy of Needs model in 1940-50's USA, and the Hierarchy of Needs theory remains valid today for understanding human motivation, management training, and personal development. Indeed, Maslow's ideas surrounding the Hierarchy of Needs concerning the responsibility of employers to provide a workplace environment that encourages and enables employees to fulfill their own unique potential (self-actualization) are today more relevant than ever. Abraham Maslow's book Motivation and Personality, published in 1954 (second edition 1970) introduced the Hierarchy of Needs, and Maslow extended his ideas in other work, notably his later book Toward A Psychology Of Being, a significant and relevant commentary, which has been revised in recent times by Richard Lowry, who is in his own right a leading academic in the field of motivational psychology.

Abraham Maslow was born in New York in 1908 and died in 1970, although various publications appear in Maslow's name in later years. Maslow's PhD in psychology in 1934 at the University of Wisconsin formed the basis of his motivational research, initially studying rhesus monkeys. Maslow later moved to New York's Brooklyn College. Maslow's original five-stage Hierarchy of Needs model is clearly and directly attributable to Maslow; later versions with added motivational stages are not so clearly attributable. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs has been extended through interpretation of Maslow's work by other people, and these augmented models and diagrams are shown as the adapted seven and eight-stage Hierarchy of Needs models below. There is some uncertainty as to how and when these additional three stages (six, seventh and eighth - 'Cognitive', 'Aesthetic', and 'Transcendence') came to be added, and by whom, to the Hierarchy of Needs model, and many people consider Maslow's 'original' five-stage Hierarchy Of Needs model to be the definitive (and perfectly adequate) concept.

Free Hierarchy of Needs diagrams in pdf and MSWord formats are available below.

(N.B. The word Actualization/Actualisation can be spelt either way. Z is preferred in American English. S is preferred in UK English. Both forms are used in this page to enable keyword searching for either spelling via search engines.)

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

Each of us is motivated by needs. Our most basic needs are inborn, having evolved over tens of thousands of years. Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs helps to explain how these needs motivate us all.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs states that we must satisfy each need in turn, starting with the first, which deals with the most obvious needs for survival itself.

Only when the lower order needs of physical and emotional well-being are satisfied are we concerned with the higher order needs of influence and personal development.

Conversely, if the things that satisfy our lower order needs are swept away, we are no longer concerned about the maintenance of our higher order needs.

Maslow's original Hierarchy of Needs model was developed between 1943-1954, and first widely published in Motivation and Personality in 1954. At this time the Hierarchy of Needs model comprised five needs. This original version remains for most people the definitive Hierarchy of Needs.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

• Biological and Physiological needs - air, food, drink, shelter, warmth, sex, sleep, etc.
• Safety needs - protection from elements, security, order, law, limits, stability, etc.
• Belongingness and Love needs - work group, family, affection, relationships, etc.
• Esteem needs - self-esteem, achievement, mastery, independence, status, dominance, prestige, managerial responsibility, etc.
• Self-Actualization needs - realizing personal potential, self-fulfillment, seeking personal growth and peak experiences.