Month: August 2018

By Alex Fradera

Abraham Maslow was one of the great psychological presences of the twentieth century, and his concept of self-actualisation has entered our vernacular and is addressed in most psychology textbooks. A core concept of humanistic psychology, self-actualisation theory has inspired a range of psychological therapies as well as approaches taken in social work. But a number of myths have crept into our understanding of the theory and the man himself. In a new paper in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, William Compton of Middle Tennessee State University aims to put the record straight.

Maslow’s most penetrating idea is that we have a hierarchy of needs, proceeding from physiological needs like water or warmth, through safety, love, esteem and then self-actualisation. He argued that lower needs occupy our attention when they are unmet and make it more difficult to fulfil the higher ones – including self-actualisation, which is about becoming the self you always had the potential to be.

Compton first deals with the charge that this work is ascientific. He finds there is a lack of strong evidence showing that individuals transition from one level of the hierarchy to the next, as Maslow claimed. However, research on this point is complicated by the widely mistaken belief that Maslow considered needs must be fully satisfied at each level before progressing. In fact, Maslow stated that everyone has unsatisfied needs at every level – who feels safe 100 per cent of the time? 

On the other hand, in favour of the idea of progression through the hierarchy is evidence from comparisons of national populations. Cross-cultural research shows that when more people in a population have their basic needs met, a greater proportion also tend to reach self-actualisation, as compared with populations that are preoccupied with scarcities. 

Maslow also claimed that people are more likely to flourish when they hold self-actualising values like spontaneity, positive self-regard, and acceptance of paradoxes. There is supportive data associating these qualities with positive outcomes – including creativity, lower anxiety or a personal locus of control, and also – and perhaps more surprisingly – higher instances of peak experiences, higher sexual satisfaction, and less fear of death.

The hierarchy is sometimes presented with another element slotted in: cognition needs, placed just below self-actualisation (as seen in these examples). In fact Maslow opposed this, as he saw cognition as a tool that can serve every need at every level, whether in knowing self-defense techniques to help you feel safe, or knowing ourselves. For him, it lay outside the hierarchy. Another point often forgotten is that self-actualisation isn’t Maslow’s pinnacle. He broke out another stage for “peakers” – self actualised individuals who also experience peak or mystical experiences.

Compton moves on to address allegations about who and what the theory is for. He disputes the idea that it encourages self-centredness: many of the self-actualisation qualities Maslow emphasised are actually centred on others, like fairness, service, and adherence to a universal framework of values. Moreover, two of Maslow’s favoured reference points when talking about self-actualisation were Alfred Adler’s gemeinschaftsgefühl (the psychological health that follows from caring about others) and the bodhisattva (the Buddhist notion of one who strives for compassion towards others). 

What about the related charge that self-actualisation is elitist, a preoccupation reserved for the privileged? This criticism needs some thinking through. There is a case that Maslow didn’t pay enough attention to how sexism or racism could impede self-actualisation, although his writings did show a more vague sensitivity to life throwing you a trickier hand. It’s true many of his self-actualised examples are white men, but he also cited figures such as Jane Addams, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman. And while it may seem like self-actualisation requires plenty of disposable income and leisure time, what Maslow meant by self-actualisation is bringing your full self to the moment, which includes dedicating yourself to work, how you treat others in daily interactions, and holding yourself to the highest standards. You can do all that from wherever you are standing.

Finally, Compton deals with the references in Maslow’s copious writing to the self-actualised as “more fully human” versus the “less evolved persons” who are lower down the hierarchy – at the very least, this is a case of bad optics. In his defense, Maslow repeatedly emphasised that he did not believe anyone was innately superior, just that some people made more of their potential. Compton argues that some of the criticism around this is motivated by defensiveness: that some people are apparently stung by the claim that someone can work on their personality and thus make it excellent, just as they can become an excellent gymnast or painter. I disagree – I think there is a case that Maslow’s language unhelpfully conjures a sense of individualistic exceptionalism that would probably feel right at home in a TED summit or posthumanist away-day. Not, I think, what he would have wanted.

Clearly, Maslow’s work is not without flaws. But his reframing of psychology to look at upwards possibilities rather than constantly into pathology sparked a shift that anticipated the positive psychology movement by decades. So his ideas deserve to be better understood, so we can use them more effectively to better ourselves, and so they can be developed and built upon for professionals who are seeking a ladder to help humanity reach greatness.

—Self-Actualization Myths: What Did Maslow Really Say?

Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) is Staff Writer at BPS Research Digest 

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By guest blogger Dan Jones

When, in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Marc Anthony delivers his funeral oration for his fallen friend, he famously says “The evil that men do lives on; the good is oft interred with their bones.” 

Anthony was talking about how history would remember Caesar, lamenting that doing evil confers greater historical immortality than doing good. But what about literal immortality? 

While there’s no room for such a notion in the scientific worldview, belief in an immortal afterlife was common throughout history and continues to this day across many cultures. Formal, codified belief systems like Christianity have a lot to say about the afterlife, including how earthly behaviour determines our eternal fate: the virtuous among us will apparently spend the rest of our spiritual days in paradise, while the wicked are condemned to suffer until the end of time. Yet, according to Christianity and many other formal religions, there’s no suggestion that anyone – good, bad or indifferent – gets more or less immortality, which is taken to be an all-or-nothing affair.

This is not how ordinary people think intuitively about immortality, though. In a series of seven studies published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Kurt Gray at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and colleagues, have found that, whether religious or not, people tend to think that those who do good or evil in their earthly lives achieve greater immortality than those who lead more morally neutral lives. What’s more, the virtuous and the wicked are seen to achieve different kinds of immortality.

The new findings complement previous work showing how we see moral character as a defining feature of people, both when they’re alive and when their souls depart. In the new studies, Gray and colleagues extended this, finding that their participants (recruited online via Amazon Mechanical Turk and including atheists and people of different religious faiths), rated historical figures who were extremely good or bad – Martin Luther King or Hitler, for example – as achieving a greater degree of immortality than morally neutral figures, such as Ameila Earhart and Andy Warhol.

Even if both good and evil people are seen to achieve greater immortality than the more morally neutral, might they nonetheless experience different kinds of immortality? For many of the world’s major religions, the answer is clearly yes: perform morally positive acts on earth and you go to The Good Place (Heaven) to enjoy total freedom in a paradisiacal realm, but do evil and you go instead to The Bad Place (Hell) to be tormented for all time.

Casting a wider anthropological net, many smaller, less formal belief systems also posit that good and evil spirits experience immorality in different ways. In particular, it’s common to find the belief that while virtuous spirits enjoy a transcendental freedom, evil spirits are more likely to be trapped or confined in some way, such as the Iroquois belief that they are eternally confined to their homes. Similar ideas crop up in popular culture too. When the evil wizard Voldemort dies in Harry Potter, his soul lives on in magical objects called Horcruxes. But when Obi-Wan Kenobi dies in the Star Wars films, his spirit is able to roam freely through the ethereal realm of the Force.

Gray and his colleagues found their participants held similar intuitive beliefs about the fates of deceased good, bad or neutral historical figures: they were more likely to see good souls as living in a transcendent state, wicked souls as trapped, and neutral souls as slightly less free than good ones but freer than bad ones. 

The reverse inference also held: reading about someone who had recently died and whose spirit had left the earthly realm and moved beyond space and time prompted participants to infer that this must have been a good person, while the converse led them to think the person must have been bad. 

Similarly, participants inferred that spirits inhabiting expansive locations, like hot deserts , arctic tundra or mountaintops, were more benevolent than those living in more confined locations, like a narrow trench,underground cave or tent in the woods, irrespective of how pleasant those locations were deemed.

Such inferences might explain why paranormal events are typically chalked up to malevolent spirits. The researchers asked more participants to imagine being in the house of someone recently deceased and that they felt a strange sensation as their spirit passed by. After reading these stories, people tended to view this spirit as malevolent, as a trapped spirit must be a bad spirit.

In explaining their findings, Gray’s team suggest that seeing good souls as free and transcendent and bad ones as confined and trapped stems in part for a basic desire for justice, with bad souls ending up in a spiritual prison and less able to roam and harm others. Such a desire may also receive a cognitive boost from the fact that notions of good and evil are metaphorically associated with ideas of lightness and airiness, and darkness and constriction, respectively.

The results did not appear to depend on whether participants already held religious beliefs about the afterlife – the same patterns were found regardless of their stated faith or supernatural belief, suggesting that our folk intuitions about immortality tend to overpower any formal belief systems that we claim to subscribe to. “These ways of thinking are very intuitive, and overcoming them takes effort,” says Gray.

One caveat to these studies concerns the fact that the participants were from a Western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic (WEIRD) society. Psychological insights generated from WEIRD participants do not always generalize to other cultures, and in this case beliefs about reincarnation may have been under-represented. But Gray and colleagues argue that the cross-cultural similarities in the beliefs about the afterlife that inspired the research suggest that the new studies tap into a universal aspect of our psychology.

Gray is currently writing up the results of follow-on studies in which he looked at how the state of someone’s mind at the point of death – say, whether it was at the peak of health or wracked by dementia – affected how participants perceived its prospects for immortality. So while we may not ever be able to achieve literal immortality, at least we may soon know what it takes for others to think we’re immortal.

—To be immortal, do good or evil

Image: Milton’s Paradise Lost – Hell at last, Yawning. Vintage engraving by Gustave Dore, from Milton’s Paradise Lost. Hell at last, Yawning, received them whole.

Post written by Dan Jones (@MultipleDraftz) for the BPS Research Digest. Dan is a freelance writer based in Brighton, UK, whose writing has appeared in The Psychologist, New Scientist, Nature, Science and many other magazines. He blogs at www.philosopherinthemirror.wordpress.com.

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