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Abraham Maslow’s 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation in Psychological Review contained no diagram at all. The famous pyramid came from consulting psychologist Charles McDermott in a 1960 Business Horizons article aimed at management training. Maslow himself said a need did not have to be fully met before the next emerged, describing overlapping waves of motivation. The episode explains his deficiency needs, physiological, safety, love and esteem, his split between lower and higher esteem, and the growth needs he added: cognitive, aesthetic and self-actualization.

Later in his career Maslow added transcendence as a sixth tier. The episode examines his 1938 time with the Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation, the claim that he stole the hierarchy, which Scott Barry Kaufman finds no evidence for, and the deeper critique that he misread their circular worldview. It covers Geert Hofstede’s 1984 charge of ethnocentrism, a 1976 review finding little support for the ranking, a 1981 study of how needs shift with age, and a 1997 study of needs in peacetime versus the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

• Maslow studied healthy high achievers such as Albert Einstein, Jane Addams and Eleanor Roosevelt.
• He summed up self-actualization as what a man can be, he must be.
• Abused children clinging to abusive parents are offered as a case where belonging overrides safety.
• In the 1981 study, older adults ranked security highest, and the order of love and esteem reversed with age.
• During the Gulf War, U.S. respondents split their needs into three distinct levels instead of grouping them closely.