Maslow didn’t draw a pyramid. So why can’t we stop drawing it for him?
Here’s a quick memory test: picture “the hierarchy of needs.” You just saw a triangle or pyramid, didn’t you? Five tidy, color-coded tiers, survival wedged at the bottom and self-actualization glowing at the top like sunrise over a mountain. It’s one of the most reproduced images in all of psychology.
And yet, Abraham Maslow never drew it. In fact, he never assigned an image of any kind to his theory.
The shape that comes so readily to mind was invented by a management consultant more than a decade after Maslow’s original 1943 paper, for an article about motivating employees as cheaply as humanly possible. Even if Maslow had drawn the pyramid, it wouldn’t have ended with self-actualization at the top. His theory (even fairly early on) included a need above it, which he identified as self-transcendence—aimed outward toward other people and toward a purpose greater than the self.
None of this should be a huge surprise. Management consultants have been “streamlining” psychological theory for about as long as psychological theory has existed.
The pyramid tells a very specific story about a lone hero scaling one glorious peak. The real story is messier, less Instagrammable, and considerably more interesting. Its central theme keeps resurfacing, discovered independently by people who had little reason to agree with one another: Maslow himself; attachment researchers; Alfred Adler; and a good number of modern research programs built on empirical data.
Lay them all out to view, and a striking pattern emerges—not a winning theory, but a shared conclusion about human need and potential.
The Search for the Architect
So if Maslow didn’t envision his theory as a pyramid, how did the image become such a familiar representation? Management scholars Todd Bridgman, Stephen Cummings and John Ballard went looking through Maslow’s published work, personal diaries and boxes of unpublished papers archived at the University of Akron. They found a rich archive, but no diagram, pyramid or otherwise.
The first known attempt to visualize the theory traces to 1957, when management writer Keith Davis illustrated it as a staircase climbing at a 90-degree angle. While Maslow had explicitly developed his theory “for all people,” Davis’s audience was obvious: the steps are populated by white men in business suits, with women and children appearing only on step three to illustrate the men’s need for “social activity.” At the top, a flag-bearing executive evokes the famous Iwo Jima photograph.
A few years later, the pyramid we recognize today appeared in consulting psychologist Charles McDermid’s article “How Money Motivates Men.” Published in Business Horizons, its mission was to help management design a compensation system that would “achieve maximum motivation at lowest possible cost—in both human and financial terms.”
“The American way of life has stressed money as the measure of status and achievement. Hence it has become most important to the satisfaction of esteem needs.”
—Charles D. McDermid, “How Money Motivates Men” (1960)
Maslow had foreseen this kind of misreading. In his original 1943 paper, he warned that treating the theory as a rigid sequence would seriously misrepresent it. But Douglas McGregor later stripped out much of Maslow’s nuance and tweaked some terms to make the theory easier to teach. In a 1957 address at MIT, McGregor acknowledged that what he was presenting would “be overgeneralized and will ignore important qualifications.” His simplified version—not Maslow’s original—made its way into management textbooks.
Bridgman and colleagues clear McGregor of one charge: “no pyramids or triangles appear in McGregor’s works.” That flourish belongs to Davis and McDermid. But much of the later criticism of “Maslow’s theory” is really criticism of the simplified version that entered popular culture.
Maslow lived another decade after McDermid’s pyramid appeared and apparently neither objected to nor endorsed it. By then he had largely withdrawn from empirical research, while the business world’s embrace of his gutted theory brought him recognition and income at a time when his finances and health were under strain. Correcting a diagram may simply not have ranked high on Maslow’s own hierarchy of priorities. Granted, once a misconception lodges itself in the public imagination, of course, it’s nearly impossible to evict, so it may have been too late for Maslow to do much about it at that point.
The Level Nobody Talks About
Maslow simply set out to describe basic human needs, not a rigid progression of satisfying them. “Any behavior tends to be determined by several or all of the basic needs simultaneously rather than by only one of them,” he wrote in 1943. His later revisions described their order as “not nearly as rigid” as some had assumed.
Bridgman, Cummings and Ballard offer one modest fix to acknowledge Maslow’s insistence that people pursue multiple needs at the same time. “Acknowledging this nuance would make a ladder a more appropriate representation than a pyramid,” they write, adding with the suggestion of a shrug, “(if a geometric representation is necessary).” Maslow himself apparently didn’t think one was.
And here’s another nuance that rarely makes the retelling. In his 1969 essay “Theory Z,” Maslow described a “second degree” of self-actualization: self-transcendence, the pursuit of purpose beyond the self through altruism, awe, spirituality and service to others. In The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, he described it as the most holistic level of human consciousness—one in which a person treats humanity, other species, nature and the cosmos as sacred.
Psychologist Mark Koltko-Rivera resurfaced this largely forgotten facet of Maslow’s theory in 2006: “It is time to change the textbook accounts of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs,” he concluded. “Inclusion of self-transcendence at the top of the needs hierarchy is a more accurate reflection of Maslow’s theory.”
“The emotional reaction in the peak experience has a special flavor of wonder, of awe, of reverence, of humility and surrender before the experience as before something great.”
—Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being
Fittingly, Maslow borrowed from Alfred Adler the term for what self-actualized and self-transcendent people extend toward humanity. Gemeinschaftsgefühl, in Adler’s framework, refers to a deep sense of social connectedness and genuine interest in the wellbeing of others—a quality Adler considered a hallmark of psychological health.
Data has since caught up with at least part of Maslow’s original idea. Psychologists Louis Tay and Ed Diener examined Gallup World Poll data from more than 60,000 people in 123 countries and found that the needs Maslow identified—survival, safety, social support, respect, mastery and autonomy—matter across cultures and independently predict wellbeing. What the data did not support was a strict sequence. People can pursue “higher” needs such as belonging and respect even when physiological needs or safety remain unmet.
The pyramid has also been criticized as distinctly Western and individualistic, particularly in collectivist cultures where community sits at the center of life. As Koltko-Rivera notes, that problem diminishes considerably when Maslow’s self-transcendence is restored to the picture.
So where does that leave Maslow? Not wrong, exactly. He identified a set of near-universal human needs. But the popular version of his theory reduced it to a shape and a buzzword. The piece worth rescuing is the one almost nobody quotes: the human need for purpose beyond the self.
What Attachment Theory Contributes
The mythical pyramid puts physiological needs first, safety second, and love and belonging third. But John Bowlby’s attachment theory challenged the assumption that an infant’s bond with its mother was merely a byproduct of feeding. Bowlby argued—and decades of research have supported—that attachment is itself a primary biological system. Safety and belonging are every bit as urgent as the drive for food.
A scientific theory remains a theory even under a mountain of supporting evidence, because science is supposed to keep testing its own assumptions. And attachment theory has been tested robustly over many years. In the 1940s, psychoanalyst René Spitz documented “hospitalism”: infants raised in institutions with good nutrition and medical care but little human contact showed severe developmental delays and sometimes failed to thrive despite having their physical needs met. A decade later, Harry Harlow ran experiments with infant rhesus monkeys, offering them a choice between a wire surrogate that dispensed milk and a soft cloth surrogate that offered none. The infants overwhelmingly chose comfort over calories, clinging to the cloth mother. His isolation studies made a stark point starker still: meeting biological requirements wasn’t enough.
“A young child’s experience of an encouraging, supportive and co-operative mother, and a little later father, gives him a sense of worth, a belief in the helpfulness of others, and a favourable model on which to build future relationships. . . . Provided family relationships continue favourable, not only do these early patterns of thought, feeling and behaviour persist, but personality becomes increasingly structured to ooperate in moderately controlled and resiliant ways . . . despite adverse circumstances.”
—John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, Vol I
Spitz and Harlow eventually corresponded and recognized that they were documenting the same phenomenon in two species. Later studies of Romanian orphans in the 1980s and ‘90s confirmed the profound developmental effects of social deprivation.
The takeaway is unequivocal: you can check every box on Maslow’s bottom tier and still watch a child fail to thrive, because the need supposedly sitting one tier higher is just as vital.
Bowlby’s and Mary Ainsworth’s “Strange Situation” research showed attachment serving two functions: a safe haven, to which a distressed child returns for comfort, and a secure base from which the child can confidently explore. Safety and belonging aren’t stacked on separate floors; they’re intertwined. And Bowlby argued that this need doesn’t disappear in adulthood. Responsive attachment figures remain anchors of security throughout life.
Maslow and Bowlby were contemporaries, born only a year apart—and while their theories don’t line up perfectly, the came to some similar conclusions. Maslow identified love and belonging as essential, but he never supplied a mechanism explaining how attachment becomes secure or why its absence does such damage. Spitz, Harlow, Bowlby and Ainsworth supplied that through observable, testable behavior. Maslow saw the need. Attachment research showed more precisely how it works.
Adler Got There First—On His Own Terms
Alfred Adler called his approach “Individual Psychology,” a name that has confused people ever since. It sounds like a psychology of the separate, self-contained person, nearly the opposite of what Adler meant. He took individual from the Latin individuum, meaning indivisible: a person had to be understood as an integrated whole rather than broken into component parts. For Adler, thoughts, feelings, behavior and physical experience formed a single system. Where Freud explained behavior largely through underlying instinctual drives, Adler argued that people actively choose and pursue goals.
The “individual,” for Adler, was never separate from other people. His concept of gemeinschaftsgefühl—social interest or “community feeling”—wasn’t one need among several. He saw it as fundamental to psychological health, present or absent throughout a person’s life. Where Maslow placed belonging among other needs and later put self-transcendence at the highest reaches of development, Adler made concern for others part of the engine of growth itself.
“Every human being strives for significance, but people always make mistakes if they do not recognize that their own significance lies in their contributions to the lives of others.”
Alfred Adler, What Life Could Mean to You
Unlike many concepts from early psychoanalytic theory, social interest made the transition into empirical research. Researchers developed measures including the Social Interest Scale and Social Interest Index, and studies have repeatedly linked greater social interest with higher self-esteem, empathy, life satisfaction and wellbeing, and with lower depression, anxiety, hostility and narcissism.
Adler’s central idea survived the jump to empirical psychology remarkably well.
Five Roads, One Destination
Across these theories, a shared pattern emerges. Human beings need connection beyond themselves in order to grow, find purpose and meaning, and feel grounded and secure.
Maslow treated love and belonging as essential and self-transcendence as the highest reaches of human development. Adler treated concern for others as fundamental to psychological health at every stage. Attachment theory, developed from an entirely different starting point, showed that a secure base and responsive safe haven are not optional comforts; our nervous systems are built to seek them.
Modern empirical research has continued arriving at much the same place. In their landmark 1995 paper, Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary argued that humans have a fundamental need to form and maintain strong, stable interpersonal bonds involving frequent positive interaction. People form attachments readily, resist losing them, and suffer a remarkably broad range of harms to health and wellbeing when such bonds are absent.
These lines of inquiry approached human need from different directions and with different methods. Yet they converge on the same point: connection to, and care for, other people isn’t merely a preference. It’s a need.
Redrawing the Picture
We started with a pyramid Maslow never drew, capped by a word—self-actualization—that stops short of where his own thinking ultimately led. The image persists because it’s tidy. It implies structure, orderly advancement and finality that neither the evidence nor Maslow’s later work supports.
Across multiple independent lines of inquiry spanning roughly a century, a different picture emerges. People need selfless commitment to the wellbeing of others. They need awe for something greater than themselves. They need purpose and meaning, and the motivation to become their best selves by reaching beyond pure self-interest.
These sources don’t agree on everything. But they converge on an underlying truth: human beings are wired for connection—not as a reward that arrives after physiological survival has been secured, but as part of the foundation on which human wellbeing is built: biologically, psychologically and interpersonally.
The pyramid sells us the image of independence and personal strength: a heroic, single-minded climb toward an impressive peak of “success,” like the motivational poster hanging in the office break room.
The real picture looks nothing like that.
We climb together, or we don’t really climb at all. Recognizing our need for—and responsibility to—one another is part of what points us toward the inner changes each of us needs to make if we’re ever going to reach our full potential. It isn’t something we can do alone.
Key References
Alfred Adler (translated by Colin Brett), Social Interest: Adler’s Key to the Meaning of Life (1938, 1998, 2009).
Alfred Adler (translated by Colin Brett), What Life Could Mean to You (1931, 1998).
John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, Volume I: Attacment, 2nd ed. (1969, 1982).
Todd Bridgman, Stephen Cummings and John Ballard, “Who Built Maslow’s Pyramid? A History of the Creation of Management Studies’ Most Famous Symbol and Its Implications for Management Education,” Academy of Management Learning and Education (March 2019).
A.H. Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (1971, 1972).
