There have been several attempts to list people’s basic needs. For example, Murray (1938) tried to list every possible need, while Edwards (1954) devised a measure of the 16 most important needs. Such listings have two problems: the lists have too many needs and there is no conceptual or theoretical basis for them. Maslow (1954) proposed that there are five basic human needs forming a hierarchy: physiological, safety and security, belongingness, esteem (self-esteem and esteem from others), and self-actualization. These five needs are in a hierarchy for three reasons.
First, when deprived, the lower need takes precedence (a potency basis). For example, if you are very hungry, the other needs become less important. Second, the higher needs appear only in the “higher” animals (a phylogenetic basis). (The notion of a simple phylogenetic scaleis no longer accepted by most psychologists, undermining one of the three reasons for the hierarchy.) All species of animals have physiological...
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Lester, D. (2017). Hierarch of Needs (Maslow). In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1483-1
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