── ── Mental model
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
Maslow's Hierarchy proposes needs organize into levels of prepotency — lower needs must be at least partially met before higher needs become motivationally dominant. Five levels: physiological → safety → love/belonging → esteem → self-actualization. The empirically supported insight is deficiency-dominance: severely unmet lower needs crowd out higher-level motivation. The strict sequential hierarchy is empirically weak (Wahba & Bridwell 1976…
How it works
Step 1 — State the situation: who is being motivated, desired behavior, current incentive, observed response.
Step 2 — Map need-state: for each level (physiological / safety / belonging / esteem / self-actualization) mark substantially met / partially met / unmet.
Step 3 — Identify incentive level: cash bonus → esteem+safety; title → esteem; growth opportunity → self-actualization; team-building → belonging; job security guarantee → safety; perks → physiological.
When to use it
- "why isn't the bonus motivating them," "already paid well but disengaged," "what need does this product really serve," "team is in survival mode," "they need to feel safe before caring about the mission," or diagnosing why a standard incentive is failing
When not to use it
formal motivational science is required (use SDT); cross-cultural nuance makes the five-level hierarchy unreliable; precise empirical rank-ordering of needs is load-bearing.
Worked example
Maslow 1943 and the Subsequent Refinements
Maslow's 1943 paper was the founding statement of humanistic psychology — a third movement positioning itself between behaviorism (which Maslow viewed as too reductive about human motivation) and psychoanalysis (which Maslow viewed as too pathology-focused). Maslow's project was to develop a psychology of healthy, thriving people — not a psychology of mental illness.
Install this skill (free, MIT)
npx skills add deciqAI/knowledge-skills