Historical Context

In the 1930s and 1940s, when Maslow began pulling together his ideas about motivation, the science of human behavior was dominated by two schools of thought: the behaviorist approach articulated by John Watson and the psychoanalytic approach originated by Sigmund Freud. Most of academic psychology was strongly experimental and behaviorist, adopting the position that only behavior that was objectively observable and measurable was appropriate for study. Much of the foundation for behaviorism had been studies of animal behavior, and very little attention was being paid to inner processes such as cognitions, emotions, or values. Behaviorists paid little attention to the question of motivation itself. They assumed that an animal was motivated to satisfy drives such as hunger or thirst and then focused on the environmental forces that shaped the way the animal responded to those drives....