The pyramid Maslow never drew

Abraham Maslow published in 1943 an article proposing a hierarchy of human needs, from physiological needs to what he called self-actualisation. The text appeared in a psychology journal and was addressed to psychologists, not to managers.

No pyramid appears in it. The triangular representation appears in the management literature of the 1960s, and its spread is the work of textbooks rather than of the author himself.

The status of the text is also often misunderstood. Maslow presents it as a theoretical proposal intended to guide research, built from his clinical experience and his reading, and not as the result of a survey or a measurement.

The pyramid imposes two ideas absent from the text: a strict order of satisfaction, and a decreasing proportion of people reaching each level, which the triangular shape visually suggests.

Maslow himself wrote that needs could be pursued simultaneously and that the order varied by person and culture, qualifications the figure erases. He spoke of relative and partial satisfaction at each level, not of a step that had to be cleared entirely before moving on to the next.

Validation attempts from the 1970s, notably by Mahmoud Wahba and Lawrence Bridwell, conclude that there is no support for the hierarchy or for the notion of prior satisfaction of a level.

An analysis published in 2011 by Louis Tay and Ed Diener, on data from more than one hundred and twenty countries, finds that the identified needs are indeed associated with reported well-being, but that their satisfaction does not follow the prescribed order.

These results do not say that the list of needs is wrong. They indicate that their arrangement in sequence is not observed, which is precisely the part of the theory the figure puts in the foreground.

It is simple, visual, and it organises a confused domain into one image. Those qualities explain its continued presence in training, independently of its validity, and they make it easy to reuse in contexts far removed from work.

It also serves as a convenient argument: presenting recognition as a higher need allows it to be substituted for demands about needs labelled lower, notably about pay.

He worked in the 1960s on applying his ideas to business, with a book published from his notes, where he is cautious about generalising his model. He acknowledges there that the data are lacking to apply it with confidence to the world of work.

That caution did not follow the figure. It is a textbook case of the difference between a published hypothesis and the use made of it in another field, where the image travels faster than its author's reservations.