0.1 What is subtle about social interaction?  (Page 11/26)

Your (and their) life, feelings, and attributes aren't the only things to think about more deeply in social interactions. You can think about the appropriate way to behave, what generalizations you are making about yourself and them, what the expectations of the other person are and how you should appropriately adapt your behavior, if it is "set" to see certain kinds of behavior in certain situations from certain types of people.

Maslow and psychological needs

The Physiological Needs. On the first level, Maslow included a range of simple biological needs recognized by all physiologists. On this most basic level are the needs for food, sex, water, optimum levels of salt, oxygen, and temperature, as well as the need for sleep, relaxation, and bodily integrity. Maslow began with these organismic demands both in order to be complete in his accounting of the body's requirements and to point out the obvious fact that no further psychological development is possible if they have not been attained. Many fields, ranging from physiology to anthropology, describe the organism's behavior during the state of physiological deprivation. These needs are so basic, in fact, that little variation in complex social behavior can be accounted for in terms of the search for these rewards.

Unfortunately, Maslow's use of the term "physiological needs" hindered the recognition of his most basic proposition: All of the needs described in his theory have their origin in the human organism. This term was an unfortunate choice, because it is in the consequences of the reward history of the later stages that the more interesting types of social behavior can best be understood.

The Safety Needs. The safety needs center around the requirement for an understandable, secure, and orderly world. Maslow ( 1970) Maslow, A. H. ( 1970). Motivation and personality ( 2nd ed.). New York: Harper and Row. categorized the various manifestations of the safety needs as the needs for: "security; stability; dependency; protection; freedom from fear, from anxiety and chaos; need for structure, order, law, limits; [and] strength in the protector" (p. 39 ). Underlying these apparently different states is the common factor of the "need for prediction and control," as described so well by Seligman ( 1975) Seligman, M. E. P. ( 1975). Helplessness: On depression, development, and death. San Francisco: Freeman. . When these needs are not satisfied, a large variety of cognitive, emotional, and motivational conditions are created. Individuals may see other people and themselves, as well as the world in general, as unsafe, unjust, inconsistent, or unreliable. Hence, they seek for, or attempt to create, areas of life that offer the most stability and protection. Therefore, deprived safety needs appear in personality as beliefs about the world, states of discomfort, and desires to create a situation that solves these discomforts.