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.
My colleagues and I have spent a decade creating new and exciting applications for needs analysis. By working out links among human needs, personality traits, values, and to a lesser extent, emotions, we applied needs analysis to self-discovery. Peter Boltersdorf used the 16 human needs to create a new approach to sports motivation, one that tells the coach how to match player to game situation. One of Peter’s clients, Matthias Steiner, won the Olympic gold medal for weightlifting in Beijing, and earned the title, “Strongest Man in the World.” Matthias’ coach, Frank Mantek, is using the 16 human needs with the German weightlifting national team. Dr. John Delnoy, Dr. Maximilian Koch and his wife Irene, Mike Jay, Thomas Staller, Raimund Frick, and their colleagues applied needs theory to executive job coaching by helping clients understand how problems in the workplace can be viewed as manifestations either of unfulfilled needs or of conflicts of needs between two or more executives. Markus Brand has written a book on business motivation and created television programs based on the 16 human needs. Dr. Stephen Judah, the Columbus (Ohio) psychologist who recently passed away, applied needs theory to relationships and marital therapy, showing how nearly all repeated quarrels in a long-term relationship arise from incompatible needs. In a workshop I was invited to attend, 90 percent of the couples said the needs analysis was helpful, with several asking how we could figure out so much about them. Dr. James Wiltz and I are currently applying needs theory to intellectual disabilities, providing new measures and proscriptions for reducing frustration, preventing violence, and maximizing self-determination. James Wiltz and I also applied needs theory to media psychology, producing a widely disseminated study on reality television. I am now applying needs theory to spirituality. Dr. Mary Ellen Milos, an Illinois psychologist, is applying needs theory to hospice counseling, and Dr. David Laman, a Michigan psychologist, is applying needs theory to health motivation. My wife, Maggi, an Ohio school psychologist, is applying needs theory to school motivation. Daniele Gianella is applying needs theory to mentoring, and his father, Brunello, is applying needs theory to selling.
From time to time I will report various applications of the 16 human needs in this blog. Thus far I have discussed the question of whether spirituality is a seventeenth human need versus a way of gratifying all 16 human needs. I have reported two kinds of curiosity, intellectual and exploratory. Since intellectual curiosity temporarily satiates, as all needs do, some children hate thinking. I have discussed how my principle of strong needs might explain marital infidelity and why politicians caught with mistresses should not be regarded as reckless. I have broken down achievement motivation into six components.
Harvard and Maslow were right: Human needs are the central organizing construct for personality and behavior. We are learning that needs analysis excels in the prediction of behavior in natural environments, something that is very difficult to do. My first effort in motivational needs – called anxiety sensitivity – predicts symptoms of Panic Disorder before they can be diagnosed, creating new opportunities for research on prevention. Today, more than 1,100 published studies have validated the construct of anxiety sensitivity, which falls under the need for tranquility.
