── ── 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

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.

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