March 30, 2026

Your Campus Runs on a Pyramid of Lies

Your Campus Runs on a Pyramid of Lies
Apple Podcasts podcast player badge
Spotify podcast player badge
Castro podcast player badge
RSS Feed podcast player badge
Apple Podcasts podcast player iconSpotify podcast player iconCastro podcast player iconRSS Feed podcast player icon

There’s a reason the same explanation keeps showing up in every staff meeting, every training, every conversation about struggling students.

It feels good.

Problem is- It wasn’t built on evidence.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs became one of the most widely accepted frameworks in education without ever being meaningfully tested the way we use it.

In this episode, we go back to where the pyramid actually came from, walk through what the research has (and hasn’t) found, and take a hard look at why it spread anyway.

Because if the foundation isn’t solid, it doesn’t matter how good your intentions are.

You’re still building on it.


Referred to in this episode:
Ep. 106, "TPT's Dirty Truths & Why You Need an Evidence-Base"

********

Join our new Skool for School Counselors community

********

Want support with real-world strategies that actually work on your campus? We’re doing that every day in the School for School Counselors Mastermind. Come join us!

********

All names, stories, and case studies in this episode are fictionalized composites drawn from real-world circumstances. Any resemblance to actual students, families, or school personnel is coincidental. Details have been altered to protect privacy.

********

Ready to spend a few days this summer with me, geeking out over school counseling and preparing for your best year ever? Grab your ticket here before this limited-seat event sells out!


This work is part of the School for School Counselors body of work developed by Steph Johnson, LPC, CSC, which centers role authority over role drift, consultative practice over fix-it culture, adult-designed systems and environments as primary drivers of student behavior, clinical judgment over compliance, and school counselor identity as leadership within complex systems.


00:00 - The Pyramid Everyone Believes

02:24 - Maslow’s Shaky Origin Story

04:39 - Who Actually Drew The Pyramid

06:57 - What The Research Found

09:30 - Global Data Breaks The Hierarchy

11:33 - Why Schools Kept Using It

14:55 - The Worksheets That Feel Like Help

16:20 - Foster Students Who Defied The Pyramid

18:54 - Our Job Is Evidence-Based Thinking

21:51 - Stop Following Diagrams

WEBVTT

00:00:07.479 --> 00:00:09.640
You've seen the pyramid.

00:00:09.960 --> 00:00:25.239
Basic physiological needs at the bottom, safety above that, belonging, esteem, and self-actualization at the top, that aspirational peak where humans supposedly reach their full potential.

00:00:25.559 --> 00:00:28.440
Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

00:00:28.679 --> 00:00:36.439
It's in graduate textbooks, teacher training, and district PD presented as established science.

00:00:36.679 --> 00:00:44.840
And at some point in your career, someone has almost certainly used it to explain why a certain student was struggling.

00:00:45.079 --> 00:00:49.400
Well, I mean, if their basic needs aren't met, they can't possibly learn.

00:00:49.719 --> 00:00:53.480
And every head in the room nodded in agreement.

00:00:53.799 --> 00:00:56.200
Because it feels true.

00:00:57.159 --> 00:01:02.680
So let me ask you a question that I suspect nobody else has ever asked you about this.

00:01:03.079 --> 00:01:05.959
Have you ever looked for the evidence?

00:01:06.280 --> 00:01:14.200
Not the feeling that it makes sense, not the fact that it's in every textbook or based on the intuitive appeal of the visual.

00:01:14.439 --> 00:01:26.920
I mean the actual peer-reviewed research, controlled studies, data testing whether human motivation actually works the way Maslow says it does.

00:01:27.240 --> 00:01:27.880
I have.

00:01:28.359 --> 00:01:34.760
And what I found is going to change how you sit in every PD session from now on.

00:01:35.880 --> 00:01:38.120
Hey, school counselor, welcome back.

00:01:38.280 --> 00:01:43.000
Today we're taking on one of the most widely accepted frameworks in our field.

00:01:43.159 --> 00:01:47.960
Something you've seen on slides, heard in trainings, and probably used yourself.

00:01:48.200 --> 00:01:58.040
But we are gonna go back to the actual research, and what we find is gonna make you think twice about every PD slide in every workshop you've ever attended.

00:01:58.359 --> 00:02:08.759
So if you're ready for some straight top, my friend, some clarity in your work, and maybe a little bit of rebellion, you are in the right place.

00:02:09.000 --> 00:02:14.120
I'm Steph Johnson, and this is the School for School Counselors podcast.

00:02:18.360 --> 00:02:25.159
All right, so let me start at the beginning because the origin story of this pyramid actually matters a lot.

00:02:25.479 --> 00:02:33.319
Abraham Maslow published a theory of human motivation in 1943 in the psychological review.

00:02:33.640 --> 00:02:37.719
He was interested in what drives human behavior.

00:02:37.960 --> 00:02:49.400
So he laid out this hierarchy, the idea that lower-level needs need to be at least partially satisfied before higher-level needs become motivating.

00:02:49.719 --> 00:02:54.599
And once he put that into the world, the theory started to spread.

00:02:55.240 --> 00:02:58.599
So, what did he base these ideas on?

00:02:59.400 --> 00:03:12.039
He used something called biographical analysis, meaning he looked at the biographies and writings of 18 people he personally identified as self-actualized.

00:03:12.439 --> 00:03:21.640
His sample included Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, Aljuis Huxley, and Beethoven.

00:03:22.039 --> 00:03:28.360
And this was a list that was heavily skewed toward educated Western men.

00:03:29.479 --> 00:03:41.000
And once he identified these men, he worked backward through their lives and declared that he had found the universal architecture of human motivation.

00:03:41.719 --> 00:03:51.400
Now, to be clear, he had no controlled studies, no experimental design, no representative sample, and no replication.

00:03:51.879 --> 00:04:04.200
This was just one man's interpretive reading of 18 biographies filtered entirely through his own judgment about who counted as a fully realized human being.

00:04:04.439 --> 00:04:13.319
And Maslow himself said that less than 2% of the population would ever achieve self-actualization.

00:04:14.200 --> 00:04:30.119
So basically, he defined the pinnacle of human development by studying an unrepresentative sliver of extraordinary historical figures and then presented what he determined as a universal law.

00:04:30.599 --> 00:04:33.079
That's Maslow's theory.

00:04:33.560 --> 00:04:36.199
But then let's move to the pyramid.

00:04:36.519 --> 00:04:39.560
Because Maslow didn't draw that.

00:04:40.199 --> 00:04:55.959
When researchers went back through the archives, including all Maslow's papers at the Center for the History of Psychology at the University of Akron, they found no trace of Maslow ever representing his ideas in pyramid form.

00:04:56.519 --> 00:05:00.519
The pyramid was actually created by other people.

00:05:27.079 --> 00:05:33.479
He published it in a business publication called Business Horizons, which was aimed at corporate executives.

00:05:33.719 --> 00:05:45.959
And from there, it found its way into management textbooks, then into education courses, then into teacher prep programs, and then into the school counseling world.

00:05:46.279 --> 00:05:51.879
And nobody along the way ever stopped to ask where's the evidence for this?

00:05:52.359 --> 00:06:02.119
And there's even one more thing worth knowing about Maslow's original theory, because I will almost guarantee no one has ever mentioned this to you.

00:06:02.359 --> 00:06:03.879
He walked it back.

00:06:04.599 --> 00:06:17.159
In a later work, Maslow admitted that his first statements about the hierarchy may have given a false impression that a need had to be satisfied 100% before the next need emerged.

00:06:17.399 --> 00:06:30.519
And so he clarified he didn't think needs worked that way, that satisfaction isn't all or nothing, and that higher needs can and do emerge before the lower ones are fully resolved.

00:06:31.000 --> 00:06:45.959
So the strict sequential model, the one that you've seen presented on the slides, that implies that a student can't access a feeling of belonging until their safety is fully addressed, is not what Maslow proposed.

00:06:46.199 --> 00:06:50.919
And yet that version is still the one that's being taught.

00:06:51.239 --> 00:06:59.799
So if the theory were sound, researchers who tested it empirically would have found some consistent support.

00:07:00.119 --> 00:07:05.399
Need A would need to be substantially met before need B became motivating.

00:07:05.639 --> 00:07:10.679
You'd be able to measure it, to replicate it, and to predict from it.

00:07:11.000 --> 00:07:13.239
But that's not what happened.

00:07:13.639 --> 00:07:30.359
In 1976, 33 years after Maslow's original paper, Mahmoud Weiba and Lawrence Bridwell published what became the defining review of empirical tests of the hierarchy in organizational behavior and human performance.

00:07:30.599 --> 00:07:36.359
They examined every major category of study that had tried to test Maslow's claims.

00:07:36.679 --> 00:07:42.519
Longitudinal studies, testing whether satisfying one level of need activated the next level?

00:07:42.839 --> 00:07:44.039
No support.

00:07:44.359 --> 00:07:50.759
Cross-sectional studies testing whether unmet needs dominate motivation the way the hierarchy predicts.

00:07:51.479 --> 00:07:53.000
No clear evidence.

00:07:53.319 --> 00:08:03.560
Their overall conclusion presented only partial support for the concept of a need hierarchy and no support for the core sequential claim.

00:08:03.799 --> 00:08:08.039
They described the theory as almost untestable.

00:08:08.759 --> 00:08:11.799
So I want you to understand what that means.

00:08:12.119 --> 00:08:17.879
Because as a trained chemist, this is sending off alarm bells like nobody's business.

00:08:18.199 --> 00:08:25.239
Here's the thing: a good scientific theory makes specific, testable predictions.

00:08:25.560 --> 00:08:31.319
It makes predictions clear enough that a study could come back and prove them wrong.

00:08:31.639 --> 00:08:37.240
If later evidence doesn't match what the theory proposes, the theory fails.

00:08:37.560 --> 00:08:40.120
That's how science is supposed to work.

00:08:40.360 --> 00:08:43.720
But Maslow's theory didn't operate that way.

00:08:44.120 --> 00:08:57.960
The framework is so vague in its definitions and so flexible in its construction that when it was tested, researchers kept finding ways to explain away the results that didn't fit.

00:08:58.280 --> 00:09:02.600
So it really couldn't be tested because it really couldn't fail.

00:09:03.000 --> 00:09:06.680
Weibha and Bridwell called it almost non-testable.

00:09:07.000 --> 00:09:09.800
Scientists have a less polite word for that.

00:09:10.120 --> 00:09:16.759
But that review was published in 1976, so almost 50 years ago.

00:09:17.000 --> 00:09:21.000
And yet this pyramid kept spreading.

00:09:21.560 --> 00:09:23.879
But the story doesn't even end there.

00:09:24.280 --> 00:09:36.360
Because 50 years after that, when researchers finally had the scale to test Maslow's claims across the entire world, the results still were not forgiving.

00:09:36.680 --> 00:09:47.080
In 2011, Louis Tay and Ed Deaner published a study that remains the most comprehensive cross-cultural test of Maslow's framework ever conducted.

00:09:47.399 --> 00:10:01.320
They analyzed data from almost 61,000 participants across 123 countries because they wanted representation from every major region of the world.

00:10:01.560 --> 00:10:03.399
And what did they find?

00:10:08.920 --> 00:10:12.440
But the hierarchy didn't hold.

00:10:21.800 --> 00:10:27.720
Tay and Deaner described it this way: needs work like vitamins.

00:10:27.879 --> 00:10:28.920
We need them all.

00:10:29.160 --> 00:10:33.480
And you don't just take one vitamin in order to make all the others relevant.

00:10:33.879 --> 00:10:38.200
A 2023 study in world development put it even more plainly.

00:10:38.519 --> 00:10:41.639
Needs are not satisfied sequentially.

00:10:42.120 --> 00:10:56.280
And in a finding that should stop all of us in our tracks, love and belonging contribute the most to life satisfaction across populations, more than physiological needs, more than safety.

00:10:56.519 --> 00:10:59.639
So the hierarchy doesn't just lack support.

00:10:59.879 --> 00:11:04.840
According to the most recent evidence, it may have the order of importance completely backwards.

00:11:05.720 --> 00:11:27.160
So we have been treating a management framework invented by a Western psychologist, honed through an unrepresentative sample, retracted in part by its own author, and unsupported by 50 years of cross-cultural research, as though it were an evidence-based educational finding.

00:11:27.320 --> 00:11:29.800
And y'all, it is not.

00:11:30.680 --> 00:11:44.519
Which makes us wonder if the evidence was that shaky early on, and if it stayed that way every time somebody examined Maslow's hierarchy, why is it still around?

00:11:44.759 --> 00:11:46.519
Why has it persisted?

00:11:46.840 --> 00:11:50.600
And the honest answer is not very flattering.

00:11:50.920 --> 00:11:54.920
But I'm gonna be honest because I think that's what we need to do.

00:11:55.399 --> 00:11:59.639
My take on this is we needed it to spread.

00:12:00.680 --> 00:12:06.840
The pyramid gave schools something that evidence-based thinking rarely gives us.

00:12:07.240 --> 00:12:15.480
It was a framework that made the work feel doable and made the people doing that work feel effective.

00:12:16.519 --> 00:12:21.160
Think about that bottom level of the pyramid, physiological needs.

00:12:21.560 --> 00:12:27.639
Student is lacking basic needs, get them food, get them a coat, connect them with the backpack program.

00:12:27.879 --> 00:12:32.120
If they have safety needs, call someone, write a referral, file a report.

00:12:32.440 --> 00:12:35.800
These are concrete, completable tasks.

00:12:36.280 --> 00:12:38.040
They have a clear endpoint.

00:12:38.280 --> 00:12:49.399
You did the thing, you see that you do it, and then the pyramid implies that doing these things is the intervention, and that everything above it should now follow.

00:12:49.639 --> 00:12:51.639
So let me be direct and real.

00:12:51.960 --> 00:13:00.519
There is a version of helping that is genuinely about kids, and then there's a version of helping that's about the adults' need to feel effective.

00:13:00.920 --> 00:13:09.000
The thing about Maslow's hierarchy was that it served both those needs simultaneously, and it was really hard to tease them apart.

00:13:09.480 --> 00:13:16.360
It gave schools a framework that made the provision of resources look like invested care.

00:13:16.920 --> 00:13:21.720
And it made the people providing these resources feel like they were moving the needle.

00:13:21.960 --> 00:13:23.639
That's why it spread.

00:13:24.200 --> 00:13:29.960
Not because it was true and tested, or really even because we ever saw any evidence for it.

00:13:30.280 --> 00:13:32.840
It spread because it felt useful.

00:13:33.560 --> 00:13:36.840
It served as a theory to justify programming.

00:13:37.080 --> 00:13:43.399
It felt useful to teachers who wanted to make the case that they were addressing the whole child.

00:13:43.720 --> 00:13:52.920
And it felt useful for educational systems that needed a clinical-sounding explanation for why they were doing what they were already doing anyway.

00:13:53.879 --> 00:13:56.280
And it's visually compelling.

00:13:56.600 --> 00:14:10.200
Researchers have described Maslow's hierarchy as one of the most cognitively contagious ideas in the behavioral sciences, meaning it spreads because it sticks, not because it's true.

00:14:10.759 --> 00:14:25.240
Its shape implies order, it implies progress, and it implies that if you handle everything on the bottom, which, just to be clear, are often the easiest needs to address, the top takes care of itself.

00:14:25.879 --> 00:14:27.800
But it doesn't.

00:14:28.360 --> 00:14:35.639
And by the time anyone noticed that, this framework was too embedded for anybody to start questioning it.

00:14:35.960 --> 00:14:42.840
The Maslow assumption became the theoretical infrastructure for an entire industry of school-based programming.

00:14:43.080 --> 00:14:48.920
And nobody in that industry ever stopped to check whether or not the framework was founded.

00:14:49.560 --> 00:14:54.040
Here's the part that should just punch us in the face as school counselors.

00:14:54.360 --> 00:14:58.280
This pattern is not unique to Maslow's hierarchy.

00:14:58.519 --> 00:15:03.080
You've seen this before, and you've probably seen it within the past week.

00:15:03.560 --> 00:15:06.120
Think about teachers pay teachers.

00:15:06.519 --> 00:15:10.759
If you listen to my episode on that, you already probably know where I'm going with this.

00:15:10.840 --> 00:15:12.519
But if you haven't, you can go back and listen.

00:15:12.600 --> 00:15:15.000
I'll put a link in the episode description.

00:15:15.320 --> 00:15:21.160
Teachers Pay Teachers is an enormous marketplace of counseling and classroom resources, right?

00:15:21.320 --> 00:15:29.480
You can go there and pick up SEL worksheets, coping skills menus, feelings charts, calm corner kits, all that kind of stuff.

00:15:29.639 --> 00:15:33.879
But none of those is required to demonstrate that it does anything.

00:15:34.200 --> 00:15:42.519
It looks counseling-oriented, it's packaged professionally, it makes the person using it feel prepared and effective.

00:15:42.759 --> 00:15:54.920
But the question of whether or not it actually produces any meaningful outcome for kids is never asked because the emotional reward of using it is considered sufficient.

00:15:55.320 --> 00:16:02.920
Maslow's hierarchy of needs is that pattern at an institutional scale with decades of momentum behind it.

00:16:03.160 --> 00:16:11.399
It was a framework that felt right, served adults who used it, and never had to prove that it actually worked.

00:16:12.040 --> 00:16:14.519
So let me step it back for a minute.

00:16:14.920 --> 00:16:22.680
Early in my school counseling career, I worked at a campus that served two institutional foster homes.

00:16:22.920 --> 00:16:25.320
So these were not typical foster homes.

00:16:25.399 --> 00:16:33.160
These were large group foster homes with many unrelated kids living under the same roof with appointed guardians.

00:16:33.639 --> 00:16:44.920
And I will tell you honestly, because I was trained that way, just like you were, I walked onto that campus and approached these kids through that pyramid.

00:16:45.720 --> 00:16:50.519
My initial assessment was that their basic needs had not reliably been met, right?

00:16:50.759 --> 00:16:53.000
Their safety had been uncertain.

00:16:53.240 --> 00:17:03.560
And the questions surrounding just their day-to-day existence about how long they would be in foster care and where they might go next made a sense of belonging feel very complicated.

00:17:04.119 --> 00:17:08.599
So I thought, how could they possibly have healthy self-esteem?

00:17:08.839 --> 00:17:11.000
How could they self-actualize?

00:17:11.240 --> 00:17:13.720
Y'all, that was the framework that I had been given.

00:17:13.879 --> 00:17:15.480
So I used it.

00:17:16.359 --> 00:17:25.319
But what I actually found when working with these students on this campus was something that the pyramid really didn't have any room for.

00:17:25.959 --> 00:17:39.559
Many of these students in foster care were more confident, more grounded, and more self-possessed than the students at that same campus whose every material need had always been met.

00:17:39.879 --> 00:17:43.159
My foster students had built determination.

00:17:43.559 --> 00:17:46.679
They had clarity about what they did not want.

00:17:47.159 --> 00:17:55.240
And they had this battle-tested sense of self-knowledge that the pyramids logic said they shouldn't have been able to access.

00:17:55.480 --> 00:17:58.599
Y'all, my foster students hadn't climbed the hierarchy.

00:17:58.759 --> 00:18:00.119
They defied it.

00:18:01.159 --> 00:18:06.839
And I tell that story because I probably had the same coursework you had.

00:18:07.159 --> 00:18:19.319
And I walked onto that campus with that framework that now I realize lowered my expectations for specific kids before I'd ever even talked to them.

00:18:19.879 --> 00:18:24.119
That's what a dangerous unexamined framework does.

00:18:24.599 --> 00:18:27.720
It shapes what you think is possible.

00:18:28.279 --> 00:18:30.359
It develops bias.

00:18:30.839 --> 00:18:34.439
It makes you draw conclusions prematurely.

00:18:34.759 --> 00:18:42.759
And if it shaped what I thought was possible, I know it has shaped what a lot of us see is possible for our students.

00:18:43.720 --> 00:18:47.240
So, really, here is the core of the whole thing.

00:18:47.959 --> 00:18:49.799
We are school counselors.

00:18:50.359 --> 00:18:57.639
We have graduate training in psychological theory, counseling methods, and child development.

00:18:57.879 --> 00:19:00.439
And we have coursework and research methods.

00:19:00.759 --> 00:19:10.839
We are on paper, some of the most, if not the most, equipped people in a school building to look at a framework and ask, where is the evidence for this?

00:19:11.559 --> 00:19:18.199
We know about this stuff, and yet we inherited Maslow uncritically.

00:19:18.439 --> 00:19:21.319
The same way, frankly, everybody else did, right?

00:19:21.559 --> 00:19:32.439
Because it was in the curriculum, it was on the slides, and it became so deeply embedded that questioning it felt really weird and even almost rude.

00:19:32.599 --> 00:19:35.399
Like we thought we knew more than Maslow.

00:19:36.599 --> 00:19:39.959
That's worth sitting and thinking through for a minute.

00:19:40.199 --> 00:19:48.599
Because we were given a framework by programs that weren't modeling what rigorous evidence-based thinking actually looks like in real practice.

00:19:48.839 --> 00:19:53.720
And that's a failure of a lot of the professional preparation we've received.

00:19:53.879 --> 00:19:56.439
And it hasn't only happened with Maslow.

00:19:57.319 --> 00:20:00.919
The good news is, though, we can do something about it.

00:20:01.399 --> 00:20:05.879
And I would even argue we have a professional obligation to do that.

00:20:06.279 --> 00:20:15.720
School counselors who are intentional about engaging seriously with the evidence base become way more confident.

00:20:16.839 --> 00:20:30.439
When you understand why frameworks don't hold up, how things work together, and what undermines your counseling efforts with students, you stop organizing your efforts around things that don't work.

00:20:30.679 --> 00:20:37.079
And you're able to have clearer conversations about the things that you are doing and why you've chosen them.

00:20:37.639 --> 00:20:41.319
That clarity is what builds clout on a campus.

00:20:41.639 --> 00:20:45.240
It is what helps you develop a voice and a sense of respect.

00:20:45.399 --> 00:20:51.159
And it helps differentiate you from program coordinator to school counselor.

00:20:52.439 --> 00:21:02.679
The school counselor who has read Weba and Bridwell is not being difficult when they say, hey, listen, this pyramid is not a good framework.

00:21:02.759 --> 00:21:04.359
We should not be using that.

00:21:04.759 --> 00:21:11.480
They are doing their job because our counseling training only means something if we use it.

00:21:11.720 --> 00:21:21.559
If you like these kinds of conversations where we look at what's been handed to us and we ask whether or not it holds water, that's what we do in the mastermind.

00:21:21.799 --> 00:21:31.240
Every single week we meet with school counselors who take evidence seriously and treat the research foundation as the asset that it actually is.

00:21:31.480 --> 00:21:35.480
Because if I'm guessing, you went into this work to actually help kids, right?

00:21:35.639 --> 00:21:37.639
Not run a substantiated frameworks.

00:21:37.799 --> 00:21:45.159
So if you want to have more of these types of conversations, the link to the mastermind is in the episode description.

00:21:45.480 --> 00:21:51.240
So the next time somebody puts that pyramid on a screen, you have a choice.

00:21:51.480 --> 00:22:01.240
You can nod and let it go and just let everybody absorb it the way you have every other time before, or you can sit with what you now know.

00:22:01.799 --> 00:22:06.599
Maslow did not draw that pyramid, he walked back on his own sequence.

00:22:07.399 --> 00:22:07.879
Model.

00:22:08.119 --> 00:22:20.439
And when researchers surveyed managers across the world and asked them to rank their needs in order of importance, only the Americans ranked them the way Maslow proposed.

00:22:21.000 --> 00:22:24.599
His hierarchy wasn't a map of human nature.

00:22:24.839 --> 00:22:32.039
It was a map of one man's and one culture's assumptions about human nature.

00:22:32.279 --> 00:22:34.839
And your students deserve better than that.

00:22:35.159 --> 00:22:39.559
We need to be following the evidence, not following the diagrams.

00:22:39.799 --> 00:22:42.679
And now you know the difference.

00:22:43.480 --> 00:22:45.639
Hey, I'm Steph Johnson.

00:22:45.720 --> 00:22:49.720
I'll be back soon with another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast.

00:22:49.879 --> 00:22:54.599
In the meantime, keep examining the evidence base and take care.