The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - November 13, 2025


The Right to be Human - Biography of Abraham Maslow (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_915)


Episode Stats

Length

7 minutes

Words per Minute

140.54971

Word Count

1,021

Sentence Count

54


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

What is it that motivates people to do what they do, and specifically in the consumer context, how can we apply Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs to consumer behavior? In this episode, Ghatam Saad discusses the theory of Maslow, and how it can be applied in consumer behavior.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.240 Hi everybody, this is Ghat Saad. I wanted today to spend a few minutes discussing one of the theories that any student who has taken a marketing course or a more specialized consumer behavior course would have certainly come across, and that is a theory that typically falls under the section on motivational theories.
00:00:24.000 That's Maslow's hierarchy of needs. What is it that motivates people to do what they do, and specifically in the consumer context, how can we apply Maslow's hierarchy of needs to consumer behavior?
00:00:36.560 Now, Maslow was a humanist psychologist. Let me just read you here. So this is in my original book in 2007, The Evolutionary Basis of Consumption.
00:00:45.620 This was an academic book, so it's a more technical scientific book, where I was trying to plant the flag of how to Darwinize consumer psychology, consumer behavior.
00:01:00.460 And here I was arguing that we are a consumatory animal. We don't just consume Coca-Cola and Starbucks, right? We consume friendships, we consume religious narratives, we consume cultures, products of culture, cultural products, movies and romance novels and literature and art.
00:01:21.340 And so, you know, most of our purpose of behavior can be consumatory in one sense or another, and therefore, if you wish to study the evolved human nature of Homo sapiens, in a modern context, of course, then turning to consumer behavior is a wonderful place to do so.
00:01:41.100 And hence, this is the field that I pioneered evolutionary consumption.
00:01:46.280 And so this book, The Evolutionary Basis of Consumption, was the book that I first came out with in 2007, where I discuss Maslow's hierarchy of needs in several passages.
00:01:56.960 And there I argue that while Maslow's hierarchy of needs has certainly offered a nice framework to study the motivational system of consumers, it is not necessarily fully accurate.
00:02:14.920 It lacks some empirical grounding, for example, and at times it has been falsified, so it's not true that the lowest physiological needs have to be met before you go up the hierarchy, all the way up to self-actualization.
00:02:30.640 Oftentimes, you might be starving, and yet you might be willing to spend your last dime on the really cool running shoes so that people within your ecosystem can respect you.
00:02:42.240 And so I came up with a taxonomy of four sets of needs, survival, reproductive, kin selection, things related to kin, and reciprocal altruism or reciprocity.
00:02:58.620 And I argue that those four Darwinian modules, rooted in an understanding of evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, are the foundational drivers of purpose of behavior in general and certainly consumer behavior.
00:03:13.460 And so for a long time, I have been interested in Maslow's hierarchy and in ways that we can improve it.
00:03:22.860 But I recently got around to reading his actual, I mean, I, you know, I knew a bit about Maslow.
00:03:31.980 He was a humanist psychologist.
00:03:33.200 He's a Jewish psychologist.
00:03:36.160 And so I had a sense of his academic trajectory, but I had never read a biography by him.
00:03:41.100 And as I've told you many times, I have an unbelievable personal library, and I want to read every last syllable of every book.
00:03:51.720 And so I've been, I always read a lot, and now I've been on a voracious, orgiastic reading spree.
00:03:59.720 And so I recently read this book, which had been in my library for many years, The Right to Be Human by Edward Hoffman.
00:04:08.180 And it's a book that came out in 1988.
00:04:12.300 It's absolutely incredible.
00:04:14.900 Now, it's incredible in that first, Maslow is a very interesting psychologist.
00:04:21.540 It's written really beautifully.
00:04:23.840 But what amazed me the most is as I was reading sections of Maslow's thoughts and his trajectory in his career,
00:04:33.380 I literally could have been writing this as an autobiography, you know, how he became disenchanted with students,
00:04:42.940 how he was now looking for a way out of the burdens of some of the burdens of being a professor,
00:04:50.480 where he could have more time to think and write.
00:04:53.680 Many of those things are exactly those that I've been feeling for a while, right?
00:05:00.240 While I love to get up and profess in front of a class, I don't like the whining.
00:05:06.720 I don't like the grading.
00:05:08.980 I don't like the sense of entitlement of the students, the administration of, you know, running a class,
00:05:17.820 the administration that comes with being a professor, going to departmental meetings.
00:05:23.980 And so as I read many of the passages in the book, you know, there's an expression that says in French,
00:05:31.220 plus la chance, plus les choses restent les mêmes, or something.
00:05:36.020 I can't remember the expression.
00:05:37.140 Like, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
00:05:40.040 I completely botched that expression.
00:05:42.680 But in any case, unbelievable book.
00:05:45.580 So if you're interested in Maslow, if you're interested in the history of psychology,
00:05:49.660 if you're interested about, you know, the incredible influence he subsequently had,
00:05:56.780 certainly in business psychology, in marketing psychology, in consumer psychology,
00:06:01.540 in many areas, while originally, you know, he was, you know, very much within the lane of academic psychology,
00:06:10.280 some of his applied work, and certainly, most famously, his Maslow's hierarchy of need,
00:06:16.680 but other work as well, really was picked up, certainly within the business school,
00:06:23.400 within academia and the business school, but also by practitioners of business and business leaders and so on.
00:06:30.400 So I highly, highly recommend that you check out this book.
00:06:33.980 I'm going to try to do these periodically, maybe once a week,
00:06:38.720 where I take a book that either I recently read or had read quite a while ago and discuss it.
00:06:45.240 I hope that you'll enjoy this new feature.
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00:07:14.340 Take care, everybody.
00:07:15.300 Thanks.
00:07:15.680 Cheers.