Our first priorities were to get food, water, and shelter. That is in congruence with Maslow’s first level, physiological needs. After establishing those necessities, we went on to making a Bondfire and reassure everyone else’s mental state so that we wouldn’t go insane (it would probably get in the way of our survival if we lost our minds). That is in alignment with safety needs, the second of Maslow’s levels.  The Bondfire also served as a source of support and love, bonding… hence the name “Bondfire”. That knocked out level three of Maslow’s- belongingness and love needs. We continued to nurture the belongingness by assigning roles and jobs for the group. If you have purpose within a group setting and are held accountable, you feel merited to be there and accepted. Moving on to Maslow’s fourth level, esteem needs, my group appropriately added a time at the end of the day(s) dedicated solely to self-care and reflection. Building on that theme of self-investment, we made sure that the effort to maintain stability and survive continued so that no one felt purposeless, so that everyone could continue to thrive and eventually focus on the fifth and final Maslow level, self-actualization. People could feel like they were challenging themselves enough and that they were growing enough to reach their full potential as a human through working towards a means to escape the island as a group.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Theory is one theory that I actually mostly agree with. I think the order of priorities that Maslow presents is one of logic and I mostly agree with it. However, since this is only a theory and motivation is ALWAYS subjectively determined, the hierarchy is not how some people go about surviving. For example, which we talked about in class, what if a kid comes from a troubled home and decides that they need to prove themselves through excelling in school and devoting all their time to such, when their home life may not be safe, or if they go hungry sometimes? Maslow’s theory does not account for that, and such skewing of the hierarchy cannot be discounted simply because it does not follow the template. Once again, we cannot draw definitive conclusions from psychological studies- the human brain is far too complex to be categorized, and if psychologists cannot unanimously decide on what is correct in their own field of study, how are teachers or anyone else supposed to limit their views to only that of one mode of thinking or another?