Have you got a “self-actualised” personality? A new test brings Maslow’s ideas into the 21st century

By Christian Jarrett Writing in the last century, Abraham Maslow (pictured left), one of the founders of Humanistic Psychology, proposed that the path to self-transcendence, and ultimately a greater compassion for all of humanity, requires “self-actualisation” – that is, fulfilling your true potential and becoming your authentic self. Now Scott Barry-Kaufman, a psychologist at Barnard College, Columbia University, believes it is time to revive the concept and link it with contemporary psychological theory. “We live in times of increasing divides, selfish concerns, and individualistic pursuits of power,” Barry-Kaufman wrote recently in Scientific American in a blog post introducing his new research. He hopes that rediscovering the principles of self-actualisation may be just the tonic that the modern world is crying out for. To this end, he’s used modern statistical methods to create a test of self-actualisation, or more specifically, of the 10 characteristics exhibited by self-actualised people, and it’s published in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology. Barry-Kaufman first surveyed online participants using the 17 characteristics that Maslow believed were shared by self-actualised people, but he found 7 of these were redundant or irrelevant and did not correlate with others, leaving 10 key characteristics of self-actualisation. Next, he reworded some of Maslow’s original language and labelling to compile a modern 30-item questio...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Mental health Personality Source Type: blogs