TL;DR
- Three researchers searched every book and article Maslow published, his published diaries, and many boxes of papers in the Maslow archive at Akron. They found no pyramid anywhere in his work.
- The triangle everyone knows first appears in 1960, drawn by a consulting psychologist named Charles McDermid in an article called «How Money motivates Men». His argument was that it could produce «maximum motivation at the lowest cost».
- Maslow’s 1943 paper anticipates the criticisms the pyramid invites and rejects them: needs are partially satisfied at once, a lower need need not be filled before a higher one emerges, and the order is not fixed.
- The empirical record is thin. A 1976 review of thirteen studies found only partial support, and none for the proposition that satisfying one need activates the next.
- Analysing 123 countries and more than 60,000 people, researchers found that the benefit of fulfilling any given need was «largely independent of whether other needs were fulfilled». The ladder does not have to be climbed in order.
There is a diagram in every introductory business course on earth. Five coloured bands stacked into a triangle. Food and shelter at the bottom, then safety, then belonging, then esteem, and at the apex, in the smallest slice, self-actualisation. It is on slides, on posters, in nursing curricula, in UX design talks, in marketing decks. It is probably the single most reproduced image in the social sciences.
Abraham Maslow never drew it.
This is not an interpretive claim. Three researchers went and checked (Bridgman, Cummings & Ballard, 2019). They examined every published book and article of Maslow’s they could identify, plus his personal diaries, which are published. One of them spent time in the Maslow archives at the Center for the History of Psychology at the University of Akron, working through boxes of papers, letters and memos. They also went through pre-1960 psychology textbooks looking for any depiction of his theory.
Their finding, in one of the authors’ own words: «We found no trace of the pyramid in any of Maslow’s writings» (Kaufman, 2019).
Where it came from instead
The trail runs through management education rather than psychology, which turns out to matter.
Maslow published his theory in 1943 in Psychological Review (Maslow, 1943). It contained no diagram. The person who carried it into the business world was Douglas McGregor, the MIT management theorist, who saw its practical appeal and, in the researchers’ description, «deliberately ignored many of the nuances and qualifications that Maslow had articulated» for ease of translation. No pyramid appears in McGregor’s writing either.
The first triangle shows up in 1957, in a widely used management textbook by Keith Davis, and it is worth describing because of what it reveals about the audience. Davis drew the theory as a series of steps inside a right-angled triangle climbing to a peak. At the top stands a man in a suit raising a flag, in a pose the researchers describe as reminiscent of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima. That version did not catch on.
The one that did appeared three years later, in Business Horizons, in an article by a consulting psychologist named Charles McDermid (McDermid, 1960). The title tells you the purpose: «How Money motivates Men». McDermid’s argument for the diagram was that it could be used to generate «maximum motivation at the lowest cost».
So the image that stands for human flourishing was drawn to help managers work out the cheapest way to get more out of employees. It was not built to explain people. It was built to be applied to them.
The researchers add one honest caveat: «If there is an earlier pyramid, we did not find it.»
What a triangle says that Maslow did not
A shape is an argument. This particular shape makes four claims, and Maslow rejected all four in the original paper.
That the levels are separate. The pyramid divides its bands with hard horizontal lines. You are in one or you are in another. Maslow’s position was that people carry partially satisfied and partially unsatisfied needs at the same time.
That you finish one before starting the next. A staircase implies completion. Maslow wrote that a lower need may be only partially met before a higher one begins to emerge.
That the order is fixed for everyone. The pyramid gives one sequence to all humans. Maslow said the order in which needs emerge is not fixed.
That the top is small and few get there. This is the geometry doing the arguing. A triangle’s apex is narrow because triangles are, and the visual smuggles in a claim about scarcity that no data supports.
The 1943 paper anticipates these readings and says they would give a false impression of the theory. Which produces the odd situation the researchers describe: most criticisms of Maslow’s theory are actually criticisms of McGregor’s simplification of it, illustrated by McDermid’s diagram, and Maslow answered them seventeen years before either existed.
Why he never objected
Maslow lived for ten years after the pyramid appeared and never publicly challenged it. That silence has been used as evidence that he approved.
The researchers’ explanation, drawn from his diaries, is sadder and more human. His professional standing in psychology was slipping. The major journals had been taken over by experimental work he found uncreative, and he felt underappreciated. He had periods of poor health and money problems. Meanwhile the management community treated him as a guru, gave him the recognition he wanted, and paid him for speaking and consulting.
The theory was being simplified in a direction he disliked, by an audience that was finally listening. There is a version of that trade in most careers.
The irony deepens once you read what Maslow actually wanted from the idea. After 1954 he was one of the few established psychologists publicly attacking the conformism of corporate life and how large organisations suppressed individual expression. He was frustrated that business treated his theory of human nature as a route to short-term profit rather than to a more enlightened society. The diagram that carried his name around the world was designed to motivate men at the lowest cost.
One more detail that the popular version usually gets wrong: in his final years, Maslow came to regard self-transcendence rather than self-actualisation as the top of the hierarchy. The apex of the famous triangle is not where he ended up.
Does the hierarchy hold up as a theory?
Separate question, separate answer, and the answer is: partly, in a shape that is not a ladder.
The classic review came in 1976, covering ten factor-analytic and three ranking studies (Wahba & Bridwell, 1976). It found only partial support for the idea of a need hierarchy. Cross-sectional studies produced no clear evidence for the deprivation-domination proposition, except regarding self-actualisation. Longitudinal studies testing the gratification-activation proposition, the claim that satisfying one need activates the next, produced no support.
The largest test came in 2011, using Gallup World Poll data from 123 countries (Tay & Diener, 2011). Need fulfilment was consistently associated with wellbeing everywhere, which is a genuine win for Maslow’s list of needs. Different needs mapped onto different outcomes: basic needs predicted how people evaluated their lives, social and respect needs predicted positive feelings.
Then comes the sentence that dismantles the staircase. The associations between wellbeing and the fulfilment of specific needs were «largely independent of whether other needs were fulfilled».
In plain terms: belonging improves your life whether or not you are financially secure. Respect helps whether or not you are safe. People in genuine hardship still pursue love and esteem and still benefit from getting them. There is no gate. The authors also found that the emergent ordering was fairly consistent for psychosocial needs but that basic and safety needs varied by country.
A separate line of work has proposed rebuilding the hierarchy on evolutionary foundations, keeping the basic structure while changing what sits at the top (Kenrick et al., 2010). That argument is ongoing and it is not the pyramid on the slide either.
Verdict on «Maslow’s pyramid»: R — Refuted as an attribution. He did not make it, and it contradicts what he wrote. Verdict on «needs must be met in order»: R — Refuted. Verdict on «these are real and important human needs»: P — Partial, supported across 123 countries, without the sequence.
Why textbooks keep it anyway
Here is the detail that turns this from a historical curiosity into something worth noticing about how ideas travel.
Management textbooks routinely present the hierarchy and then, in the same chapter, note that it has not performed well in empirical studies. The lack of support is one of the standard criticisms textbook authors themselves make. And they include it anyway.
Maslow was not even the only option available at the time. Walter Langer had a competing theory of physical, social and egoistic needs, and it appeared alongside Maslow’s in an early management textbook. Almost nobody has heard of it. It did not come with a picture.
This is the mechanism by which a diagram outlives the theory it illustrates. Once an image is memorable enough, it stops depending on whether the underlying claim survives testing. The picture becomes the thing being taught, and the evidence becomes a footnote acknowledging that the thing being taught does not hold up.
A note on the Blackfoot story
A claim has circulated widely that Maslow took his hierarchy from the Blackfoot people, after fieldwork he did with the Siksika in 1938. It deserves separating into two questions, because they have different answers.
Did he take the pyramid from them? No, and the archival work settles it: he did not draw a pyramid at all. The version people point to, in which the tipi stands upright with self-actualisation at the base rather than the apex, is being compared against a diagram Maslow never made. A management consultant drew it in Indiana in 1960.
Did the visit shape his thinking, and did he credit it? That is a live and serious question, and it is not resolved by the pyramid finding. The fieldwork was real and mattered to him. His biographer devoted a chapter to it, and he discussed the Blackfoot in his 1954 book, but the 1943 paper contains no acknowledgement of that influence.
The debate is also not one-sided among Blackfoot scholars. Ryan Heavy Head and Narcisse Blood, the researchers who have worked most closely on this question, do not characterise it as theft. Others do. At least one widely shared article making the appropriation case has since been publicly revised by its own author.
Verdict on «Maslow stole the pyramid from the Blackfoot»: R — Refuted, because there is no Maslow pyramid to have stolen. Verdict on «Blackfoot thought influenced the hierarchy and went uncredited»: H — Untested in the sense that matters here: it is a question about intellectual history and attribution that the archival work on the diagram does not answer either way.
What to draw instead
The researchers have a suggestion, and it is unglamorous in a way that makes it convincing. Use a ladder.
Their reasoning is entirely about what the picture permits. On a ladder your hands and feet occupy several rungs at once, which is what actually happens with needs. You can climb down as easily as up, which is also what happens. And a ladder has no apex, so it stops implying that fulfilment is a scarce summit that most people fail to reach.
The pyramid survives for a reason none of this touches. One of the authors, after twenty years of teaching management, puts it plainly: if students remember one thing from an introductory course, it is the pyramid. It is intuitive, memorable, and it looks good on a slide. Textbook authors keep including the theory while listing its lack of empirical support, because the image is worth more than the evidence.
The shift: stop treating the diagram as a summary of the theory and start treating it as a separate claim by a different author with a different purpose.
First move: when a famous idea comes with a famous image, check who drew the image. Here it was a consultant in 1960, arguing for motivation at the lowest cost.
Second move: drop the sequence. Across 123 countries, the benefit of meeting one need did not depend on whether the others were met.
Third move: if you teach this, draw a ladder. Multiple rungs are occupied at once, movement goes both ways, and there is no narrow summit implying most people fail.
The boring bottom line
Every published book, every article, the personal diaries and boxes of archived papers were searched. There is no pyramid in Maslow. The triangle was drawn in 1960 by a consulting psychologist for an article about how money motivates men, and its selling point was maximum motivation at the lowest cost.
The needs themselves hold up reasonably well across 123 countries. The staircase does not: meeting one need helps you whether or not the ones below it are met. And the man whose name is on the diagram spent his later career arguing that corporate life crushed the very thing his apex was supposed to represent.
It is a good list wearing the wrong shape.
Sources
- Bridgman, T., Cummings, S., & Ballard, J (2019). 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. 18(1), 81-98. Archival study covering Maslow's published books and articles, his published diaries, the Maslow archive at the University of Akron, and pre-1960 psychology textbooks. No pyramid found in any of Maslow's work. doi:10.5465/amle.2017.0351
- McDermid, C. D (1960). How money motivates men. Business Horizons. 3(4). Where the pyramid first appears, argued as a route to 'maximum motivation at the lowest cost'. doi:10.1016/s0007-6813(60)80034-1
- Maslow, A. H (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review. 50(4), 370-396. Contains no diagram, and anticipates the rigid readings the pyramid invites: needs are partially satisfied simultaneously, and the order is not fixed. doi:10.1037/h0054346
- Wahba, M. A., & Bridwell, L. G (1976). Maslow reconsidered: A review of research on the need hierarchy theory. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance. 15(2), 212-240. Ten factor-analytic and three ranking studies: only partial support. No support for the gratification/activation proposition. doi:10.1016/0030-5073(76)90038-6
- Tay, L., & Diener, E (2011). Needs and subjective well-being around the world. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 101(2), 354-365. 123 countries. 'The associations of SWB with the fulfillment of specific needs were largely independent of whether other needs were fulfilled.' doi:10.1037/a0023779
- Kenrick, D. T., Griskevicius, V., Neuberg, S. L., & Schaller, M (2010). Renovating the pyramid of needs: Contemporary extensions built upon ancient foundations. Perspectives on Psychological Science. 5(3), 292-314. Proposes keeping the foundational structure while rebuilding the upper levels on evolutionary grounds. doi:10.1177/1745691610369469
- Kaufman, S. B (2019). Who created Maslow's iconic pyramid?. Scientific American (Beautiful Minds blog). Interview with Bridgman, Cummings and Ballard. Source of the authors' direct statements about the archival search, the Davis 1957 illustration, McGregor's simplification, and their recommendation of a ladder. scientificamerican.com