Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [330]
Maslow (1908–1970) was a complex, enthusiastic, and thoughtful man whose life had well fitted him to the task of theorizing about human motivations. One of seven children of an immigrant family in Brooklyn, he was an unhappy, neurotic child, and a chronic outsider. This motivated him to school achievement of a high order, largely overcoming his unhappiness and isolation. Moving upward through the academic ranks at Teachers College, Brooklyn College, and Brandeis, he worked closely with a variety of colleagues—behaviorists, animal psychologists, a leading neurologist, Gestaltists, and psychoanalysts (he himself underwent analysis)—seeking to understand human motivations and to fit all that he learned into a comprehensive scheme. He died of a heart attack at sixty-two, but not before completing that task.
Maslow pictured human needs and the motivations arising from them as a hierarchy or pyramid. Its broad base, on which all else rests, consists of the physiological needs; the next higher layer, of the safety needs (for security, stability, freedom from fear, and so on); still higher, of the psychological needs, which are largely of a social nature (the needs for belonging, love, affiliation, and acceptance; the needs for esteem, approval, and recognition); and finally, at the pinnacle, of the “self-actualization needs” (the need to fulfill oneself, “to become everything that one is capable of becoming”).70
Research by others on social motivation explored many of these topics and spelled out how social motivation is tied into personality traits. Insecure people, for instance, have a strong need for approval; as a result, they consistently strive to convey socially desirable traits. On personality tests they will lay claim to sentiments that are admirable but rarely true, such as “I have never intensely disliked anyone,” and deny others that are socially undesirable but generally true, such as “I like to gossip at times.” Most people seek a degree of social approval in this fashion, but those with a particularly strong need for approval do so to such an extreme that others see them as sanctimonious and unlikable.71
Many other aspects of social motivation were hot topics in the field from the 1960s to the 1980s—more, indeed, than can be included in this brief account. Social motivation is so broad a topic that our sampling has given us only a taste of it. But we cannot spend more time here; there have been so many developments and discoveries in the field of emotion and motivation in the past generation, especially the past fifteen years, that we must hasten on to wander through a veritable sideshow of recent psychological curiosa.
Patchwork Quilt
We have come a long way from half-starved rats scurrying across an electric grid for a morsel of food, and from Cannon’s cats, hissing with rage at barking dogs although their viscera had been disconnected from their brains.
As we followed the story, it may have seemed that early theories were disproved by later research and discarded in favor of new ones, but the reality is far more complicated: Still later evidence has often revalidated old theories without invalidating the newer ones. Once more it appears that in psychology few theories are ever proven dead wrong; rather, they are shown to be limited and incomplete but to have value when pieced together with other theories in an inclusive, if untidy, patchwork quilt of theory.
The James-Lange theory is the prime example of an early one that still occupies a place in the quilt. It seemed to be outmoded by Cannon’s work, which located the source of emotion in the thalamus, and by the Schachter-Singer experiment, which found it to be in the mind, but in 1980 Robert Zajonc, a distinguished researcher and scientific provocateur, revived it in new form on the basis of his own finding that feeling states occur prior to cognitive evaluation.