ABRAHAM MASLOW

Abraham Maslow

Abraham Maslow

Introduction

Abraham Maslow is a well-known psychologist for his theory on human motivation, specifically the Hierarchy of needs theory, and for his work with monkeys. Maslow's theory can also be defined as "intensity at a task". This means that greater the motivation, the more constant and intense one will perform s specific task. The basis behind this theory is the knowledge that all behaviour is goal driven, meaning one will do tasks according to what they obtain after the task is complete. Maslow has been a very inspirational figure in personality theories.

The Hierarchy of Needs theory has four different levels before one comes to full self-actualizing. These levels are, in order, the psychological needs, safety, love and care and esteem needs. The psychological needs are those one needs to survive, such as food, water, oxygen, shelter and more. Then comes the need for safety and protection for one's family' these needs include safe shelter, security, protection from both mental and physical damage, and others. Thirdly is the need for love and care, which is the need for affection, friends and relationships in general. Lastly, the esteem needs. These needs are those that one gets from him or herself. There are two types, low self esteem and a high self esteem. The low self esteem needs include wanting the respect of others, status, fame, recognition and even dominance. The high self-esteem need is to have respect for yourself; this is the higher of the two self-esteems because self-respect is harder to loose than the respect of others.

Self-actualization is to have all of the needs fulfilled and to be settled with a good job. According to Maslow, a person who is fully self-actualized, have the following character traits. According to his research, e stated that self-actualizers tend to be reality centred, meaning these people can distinguish between what is fake and dishonest from what is real and true. They were problem centred; people treated life's difficulties as problems demanding solutions, the need for privacy and they were independent of culture and relied on their own experiences and judgments; they were, in the best sense, non conformists. Those who were self-actualized had democratic values; open to ethnic and individual variety, social interest and they enjoyed having intimate personal relationships with a few close friends.

Maslow recorded these findings by observing a group of historical figures, which included Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Ghandi, Albert Einstein and others. In his findings, he also stated that self-actualizers have a pacifist sense of humour, which means they would rather tell jokes about themselves or at the world in general rather than at others. These people accepted people for who they were; they didn't try to change them to what they thought each person should be like and they prefer being themselves than being pretentious or artificial.

With all these high-quality traits, there were some flaws with the self-actualizers studied by Maslow. These flaws were that the subjects that were being tested on suffered from anxiety and ...