Self-Actualization, Meta Values, and Creativity

Abstract

The humanistic psychologists, Rogers and Maslow, have suggested that values have an organismic or biological basis and thus can and should be studied empirically. The strategy followed by Maslow has been to ask self-actualizing people or people who are especially open to experience, including organismic experience, what they value. Maslow found that such people value a set of qualities which he called metavalues, a partial list of which includes truth, goodness, beauty, unity, dichotomy transcendence, aliveness, uniqueness, perfection, necessity, completion, justice, order, simplicity, richness, effortlessness, playfulness, self-sufficiency, meaningfulness, and love. Maslow concluded that this list of metavalues is an approximation of the good. Unfortunately Maslow's research methods were relatively informal; and, it was felt that his results should be replicated. This study attempted such a replication by correlating scores on a measure of self-actualization with endorsement of metavalues. Positive and significant correlations suggested that Maslow's conclusions were correct. Nonsignificant correlations suggested no relationship of self-actualization and measures of creativity.