【L1】 【L7】

Good morning, everybody. Today’s lecture is about Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. This seems like a psychological topic. Actually it is something psychological. Abraham Maslow is a sychologist and he is especially known for his theory of human needs. Ok, first of all, what is a need? Here we can simply define it as a personal requirement. Maslow believes that humans are wanting beings who seek to fulfil a variety of needs. According to his theory, these needs can be arranged in an order according to their importance. It is this order that has become known as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In this hierarchy of needs, at the most basic level are physiological needs. Fundamentally humans are just one species of animal. We need to keep ourselves alive. Physiological needs are what we require for survival.
    These needs include food and water, shelter and sleep. At this level, for us humans, Maslow also includes the need for clothing. How are these needs usually satisfied It is mainly through adequate wages. Then what is the next level of needs? At the next level are safety needs, the things we require for physical and emotional security. Physical security is easy to understand. Everybody needs to keep his body safe from injury, illness, etc. Then, what is emotional security? Well, that may be the point in this hierarchy of needs where humans begin to differ from other animals. We’re thinking animals.
    We have worries — what if I lost my job? What if I was struck down by a severe disease? Besides physical security, we need to think we are safe from misfortunes, both now and in the foreseeable future. How can these needs be met then? According to Maslow, safety needs may be satisfied through job security, health insurance, pension plans and safe working conditions. After this stage come the levels of needs that are particular to human beings.
    The immediately following levels are the social needs. Under this category, Maslow puts our requirements for love and affection and the sense of belonging. We need to be loved, we need to belong to a group, not just the family, in which we can share with others a common interest. In Maslow’s view, these needs can be satisfied through the working environment and some informal organizations. Certainly we also need social relationships beyond the work place, for example, with family and friends. Next, the level of esteem needs. What are esteem needs then? They include both the need of self-esteem and the need of esteem of others. Self-esteem is a sense of our own achievements and worth. We need to believe that we’re successful, we’re no worse, if no better, than others. The esteem of others is the respect and recognition we gain from other people, either through our work or our activities in other social groups.
    The ways to satisfy esteem needs include personal achievements, promotion to more responsible jobs, various honours and awards, and other forms of recognition. What follows is the top level of this hierarchy of needs. These are the self-realisation needs.  In other words, they’re the needs to grow and develop as people, the needs to become all that we’re capable of being. These are the most difficult needs to satisfy. Whether one can achieve this level or not perhaps determines whether one can be a great man or just an ordinary man. Of course, it depends on different people. The means of satisfying them tend to vary greatly with the individual.
    For some people, learning a new skill, starting a new career after retirement could quite well satisfy their self-realisation needs, while for other people, it could be becoming the best there is in certain areas. It could be becoming the president of IBM. Anyway, being great or ordinary is what others think, while self-realisation is largely individual.
    Maslow suggests that people work to satisfy their physiological needs first, then their safety needs and so on up to needs ladder. In general, they are motivated by the needs at the lowest level that remain unsatisfied. However, needs at one level do not have to be completely satisfied before needs at the next higher level come into play.
    If the majority of a person’s physiological and safety needs are satisfied, that person will be motivated primarily by social needs, but any physiological and safety needs that remain unsatisfied will keep playing an important role.
    Ok, that’s the general picture of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Just to sum up, I’ve briefly introduced to you Maslow’s theory. Maslow thinks there are 5 kinds of human needs with each one being more important than the preceding one. I hope that you’ve found his  ideas interesting and in our next lecture, we’ll mainly discuss the practical implications of his theory.