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, it doesn’t appear in any of his published work or surviving papers.
The shape that comes so readily to mind was invented for business managers more than a decade after Maslow’s original 1943 paper, in an article about extracting maximum employee motivation at minimum cost. Even if Maslow had drawn the pyramid, it likely wouldn’t have ended with self-actualization at the top. His theory grew to include a further element 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 gurus have long found reasons to streamline psychological theory.
While the pyramid tells a very specific story about a lone hero scaling one glorious peak, the real story is considerably more interesting. Its central theme keeps resurfacing in different forms, developed by thinkers and researchers approaching human motivation from very different directions: Maslow himself; attachment researchers; Alfred Adler; and several modern research programs built on empirical data.
Their conclusions reveal a striking pattern 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Bridgman, Stephen Cummings and John Ballard went looking through Maslow’s published work, personal diaries and boxes of unpublished papers archived at the University of Akron.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 simplified Maslow’s account, dropping qualifications and changing some terms to make it 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 some familiar criticism of “Maslow’s theory” is really criticism of the rigid version that has 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 the simplified 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, 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. In the same paper, he described their order as “not nearly as rigid” as his presentation might suggest. People pursue several needs at once, and circumstances can alter which need takes precedence. Bridgman, Cummings and Ballard observe that, “Acknowledging this nuance would make a ladder a more appropriate representation than a pyramid,” 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 distinguished ordinary self-actualizers from “self-actualizing transcenders,” whose lives were centered on values and purposes beyond themselves. Psychologist Mark Koltko-Rivera later argued that Maslow’s final writings amount to a revised hierarchy, with self-transcendence beyond self-actualization.
In The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, Maslow 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.
“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 the concern that psychologically healthy people extend toward humanity. Gemeinschaftsgefühl, in Adler’s framework, refers to a deep sense of social connectedness and genuine interest in the well-being 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 several categories related to Maslow’s account—survival, safety, social support, respect, mastery and autonomy—mattered across cultures, each showing its own association with well-being. 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, recognizing Maslow’s late emphasis on self-transcendence partly answers that criticism.
So where does that leave Maslow? Not wrong, exactly. Some of the broad categories he identified do appear to matter across cultures. 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 organized by a primary biological system. Attachment theory therefore treats proximity, protection and comfort as primary motives, not byproducts of feeding.
A scientific theory isn’t merely an educated guess; it’s an explanatory framework that remains open to testing and revision. Attachment theory has generated an enormous body of such testing from its inception and continues to do so today.
In the 1940s, psychoanalyst René Spitz documented “hospitalism”: infants raised in institutions receiving food, shelter and routine care—but little consistent, responsive human contact—showed severe developmental decline and high mortality.
A decade later, Harry Harlow ran experiments with infant rhesus monkeys. Given a choice between wire and cloth surrogates, the infants overwhelmingly preferred the soft cloth one—even when milk came only from the wire surrogate. The surrogate studies showed that feeding alone couldn’t explain the attachment; his subsequent 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 operate in moderately controlled and resilient ways . . . despite adverse circumstances.”
—John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, Vol I
Spitz and Harlow eventually corresponded and recognized strong parallels between what they were observing in human infants and rhesus monkeys. Later research involving Romanian children subjected to profound institutional deprivation documented lasting effects across physical, cognitive, neurological and social development—and showed that earlier placement in responsive family care improved many outcomes.
The takeaway is unequivocal: food and shelter alone are not enough for a child to thrive. Responsive care is not a luxury to be postponed until those needs have been checked off.
Bowlby’s theory, together with Mary Ainsworth’s “Strange Situation” research, described two closely related functions of attachment: 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 identified love and belonging as essential, but his broad account did not explain the processes through which close relationships provide security—or why relational deprivation can be so damaging. Spitz, Harlow, Bowlby and Ainsworth supplied observable patterns that could be investigated empirically. Maslow saw the broad need; attachment research showed how one especially important form of human connection operates.
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 organize their behaviors around goals rather than simply being pushed by biological urges.
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, operating to varying degrees 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 using these measures have often found the expected pattern: higher social-interest scores are associated with qualities such as empathy, self-esteem, and well-being, and lower scores with several forms of distress and hostility.
Different Roads, a Shared Theme
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; they reflect deep systems for seeking protection, reassurance and proximity.
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 well-being 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 with 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 several traditions and roughly a century of research, a different picture emerges. Human beings need connection, responsive care and enduring relationships. Other strands of the story point beyond connection alone—to purpose, awe, concern for others and commitments larger than the self.
These sources don’t agree on everything and their concepts aren’t interchangeable. But they repeatedly undermine the picture of fulfillment as a solitary ascent. Connection isn’t merely a reward waiting above the necessities of life—it’s woven through our biological survival, psychological security and interpersonal flourishing.
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: Attachment, 2nd ed. (1969; revised 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 & Education (March 2019).
A.H. Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (1971, 1972).
