Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

6. According to Maslow, a person with no job, no home, and 
no friends can become self-actualized. True or false?
R E T H I N K
1. Which approaches to motivation are more commonly 
used in the workplace? How might each approach be used 
to design employment policies that can sustain or increase 
motivation?
2. From the perspective of an educator: Do you think that giving 
students grades serves as an external reward that would 
decrease intrinsic motivation for the subject matter? Why 
or why not?
Answers to Evaluate Questions 
1. motives;
2.
instincts;
3.
drive r
eduction; 4. homeostasis;
5.
intrinsic, 
extrinsic; 6. false; lower
-order needs must be fulfi
lled befor
e self-
actualization can occur
K E Y T E R M S 
motivation p. 309
instincts p. 309
drive-reduction approaches to motivation p. 310
drive p. 310
homeostasis p. 310
arousal approaches to motivation p. 311
incentive approaches to motivation p. 312
cognitive approaches to motivation p. 313
self-actualization p. 314
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As a sophomore at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Lisa Arndt followed a 
menu of her own making: For breakfast she ate cereal or fruit with 10 diet pills and 
50 chocolate-fl avored laxatives. Lunch was a salad or sandwich; dinner: chicken and 
rice. But it was the feast that followed that Arndt relished most. Almost every night at 
about 9 p.m., she would retreat to her room and eat an entire small pizza and a whole 
batch of cookies. Then she’d wait for the day’s laxatives to take effect. “It was extremely 
painful,” says Arndt of those days. . . . “But I was that desperate to make up for my 
binging. I was terrifi ed of fat the way other people are afraid of lions or guns.” 
(Hubbard, O’Neill, & Cheakalos, 1999, p. 59) 
Lisa was one of the 10 million women (and 1 million men) who are estimated to 
suffer from an eating disorder. These disorders, which usually appear during ado-
lescence, can bring about extraordinary weight loss and other forms of physical dete-
rioration. Extremely dangerous, they sometimes result in death. 
Why are Lisa and others like her subject to such disordered eating, which 
revolves around the motivation to avoid weight gain at all costs? And why do so 
many other people engage in overeating, which leads to obesity? 
To answer these questions, we must consider some of the specifi c needs that 
underlie behavior. In this module, we examine several of the most important human 
needs. We begin with hunger, the primary drive that has received the most attention 
from researchers, and then we turn to secondary drives—those uniquely human 
endeavors based on learned needs and past experience that help explain why people 
strive to achieve, to affi liate with others, and to seek power over others.
The Motivation Behind 
Hunger and Eating
Two hundred million people in the United States—some two-thirds of the population—
are overweight. Almost a quarter are so heavy that they have  obesity,  body weight 
that is more than 20 percent above the average weight for a person of a particular 
height. And the rest of the world is not far behind: A billion people around the globe 
are overweight or obese. The World Health Organization has said that worldwide 
obesity has reached epidemic proportions, producing increases in heart disease, dia-
betes, cancer, and premature deaths (Hill, Catenacci, & Wyatt, 2005; Stephenson & 
Banet-Weiser, 2007).
The most widely used measure of obesity is body mass index (BMI), which is based 
on a ratio of weight to height. People with a BMI greater than 30 are considered 
obese, whereas those with a BMI between 25 and 30 are overweight. (Use the for-
mulas in Figure 1 to determine your own BMI.) 
Although the defi nition of obesity is clear from a scientifi c point of view, people’s 
perceptions of what an ideal body looks like vary signifi cantly across different cultures 
and, within Western cultures, from one time period to another. For instance, many 
contemporary Western cultures stress the importance of slimness in women—a