Understanding humans

Why Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs Matters

Maslow's Hierarchy, (or Pyramid), of Needs is one of the central ideas in modern economics and sociology. The work of a once little-known American psychologist, it has grown into an indispensable guide to understanding the modern world. This film explains who Maslow was, what his pyramid is, and why it matters so much.

One of the most legendary ideas in the history of psychology is located in an unassuming triangle divided into five sections referred to universally simply as ‘Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs’.

Maslow suddenly saw that human beings could be said to have essentially five different kinds of need: on the one hand, the psychological or what one could term, without any mysticism being meant by the word, the spiritual and on the other, the material. For Maslow, we all start with a set of utterly non-negotiable and basic physiological needs, for food, water, warmth and rest. In addition, we have urgent safety needs for bodily security and protection from attack. But then we start to enter the spiritual domain. We need belongingness and love. We need friends and lovers, we need esteem and respect. And lastly, and most grandly, we are driven by what Maslow called – in a now legendary term – an urge for self-actualization: a vast, touchingly nebulous and yet hugely apt concept involving what Maslow described as ‘living according to one’s full potential’ and ‘becoming who we really are.’