Four generations of Harvard University psychologists – William James, William McDougall, Henry A. Murray, and David McClelland – sought to identify the human needs that make us tick. Abraham Maslow, a Brandeis psychologist, suggested a hierarchy of human needs driven by the overarching goal of self-actualization.
Today needs theory has little influence in psychology. What happened? How could the idea of human needs – so obviously relevant to understanding people – be ignored in contemporary psychology? Who pressed the “delete” button?
With the benefit of hindsight, I think previous needs theorists set the right course for the scientific study of personality, but they left three essential tasks undone. My colleagues and I have been busy addressing these unmet elements of needs theory to bring this important approach back to life.
First, previous needs theorists put forth theoretical lists of human needs and spent little time demonstrating the reliability and validity of their taxonomy. Maslow wrote that he did not know how to scientifically validate his theory beyond subjectively interviewing people. Critics charged that the lists of needs were invalid, too long, and even invented on the spot to provide bullet-proof, circular definitions of behavior.
Susan Havercamp and I addressed the requirement of a scientific taxonomy of human needs to replace yesterday’s many lists of personal favorites. We asked thousands of people from many walks in life and cultures what motivates them. We executed a series of now published exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Our results, which overlapped significantly with previous lists, showed 16 human needs, called acceptance, curiosity, eating, family, honor, idealism, independence, order, physical activity, power, romance, saving, social contact, status, tranquility, and vengeance. Nearly all psychologically important motives can be reduced to these 16.
Second, previous needs theorists produced very few measures, and their primary measure, Murray’s Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), has become controversial. Lacking reliable and valid measures of human needs, researchers were limited in what they could study. Needs theory declined significantly when scholarly reviews of projective assessment failed to demonstrate convincingly the reliability and validity of the measures. Donald Jackson’s “Personality Research Form” was an excellent effort, but it came too late to stop the decline in interest in needs theory.
I created the “Reiss Motivation Profile (RMP),” a 128-item standardized questionnaire, to measure the strength of each of the 16 needs for any particular person. Ken Olson from Fort Hays State University and other colleagues have demonstrated the reliability and validity of this instrument in a series of published studies with about 5,000 research participants. Further, people who have taken the RMP tend not only to agree with the results but some – as with Myers Briggs – become enthusiastic about their results. The validity can be proved scientifically, or it can be observed in real-world behavior.
Third, previous needs theorists offered few practical applications. Murray applied needs to clinical diagnosis, but when psychiatric nomenclature changed with the introduction of DSM III, psychodynamic diagnosis lost market share. Maslow applied needs theory to self-discovery, but lacking a precise measure of needs, he could not individualize self-discovery applications and was stuck with an invalid, “one-size-fits all” hierarchy of needs. In the corporate world of executive job coaching, Maslow’s message -- that some people are more self-actualized than others – was no match for the message of Myers Briggs, that individuals have different but equal natures that give rise to misunderstandings.
