Personality Analysis

Personality Analysis

Humanistic Personality Theory

The humanistic perspective in psychology emanated from the work of the late Abraham Maslow. It was conceived in opposition to the orthodox conception of science which to Maslow both mechanized and dehumanized the person. He rejected reductionism and mathematical atomism as methods that are ill-suited in psychology. He felt that the first obligation of any meaningful science was to confront all of reality as experienced by men and women, rather than to confine research only to phenomena that are tractable to the conventional scientific method. Science was to be 'problem centred' rather than 'method centred'. In his earlier career the available methodological tools served him well as Maslow worked with dogs and monkeys, but it failed miserably when he started to ask questions about the so-called 'higher life' of human beings. It was at this stage that he saw a need for a humanistic psychology quite different from the prevailing behaviourism centred on research involving pigeons and rats. In short, the term 'humanistic' must be understood in contrast to 'animalistic'. There cannot be any meaningful knowledge about human nature unless we come to grips with the distinctly human needs that are not shared with animals; they include the higher needs for self-respect, truth, justice, self- actualization and self-transcendence. Such emphasis characterizes the humanistic research agenda. It explicitly recognizes motivations that are moral or social, thereby transcending self-interest and allowing for so-called 'disinterested behaviour', intrinsic motivation, genuine altruism and moral conduct. Maslow's theory has generated mixed empirical results, but even critics accept its powerful impressionistic appeal, particularly when it is investigated across societies at different stages of development (Rogers, 1957).

In economics, the humanistic perspective asserted itself in more rudimentary form almost two centuries ago in the writings of J.C.L. Simonde de Sismondi, a Swiss economist, who criticized the early preoccupation with accumulation of wealth and the neglect of how this wealth should be distributed in order to alleviate human suffering and maximize human well-being. Later on, it was the Englishman John Ruskin and his follower John Hobson who criticized economics for neglecting the human element, especially the economist's emerging inclination to focus almost exclusively on consumer satisfaction and the efficiency of competition often at the cost of meaningless and degrading work. E.F. Schumacher continued this tradition, but focused on the process of economic development and the use of a more personal 'human-scale' technology, even adding a chapter on 'Buddhist economics'. In other words, the keynotes of a humanistic economics have always been an analysis of the effect of economic processes and institutions on human welfare, including the higher needs of personality and moral integrity (Rogers, 1957).

Ever since Sismondi, the person has been described as a being with various basic needs — material, social and moral. As conventional economists were drawn increasingly to the use of mathematics — in the process attempting to reduce needs to a set of commensurable wants — it was the mathematical economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen who reminded his colleagues that the treatment of qualitatively ...