Abe V Rotor
People who have experienced sleep paralysis mistake it as bangongot. It is because of its very nature as a near death experience and it is indeed very scary. I have experienced it myself in a number of times at least in two ways. The most common is when you are dreaming, say of running but you can’t run, box someone but you can’t raise your arm. Imagine you are being chased by a wild animal and you are glued in your place! There’s one thing you can do: panic and talk incoherently or shout. You wake up tired, panting, perspiring, trying to decipher whether the experience is true or just a dream. It is so vivid that when you are back to your senses you can relate perhaps the whole story.
The other kind of sleep paralysis is more frightening. It is one that may or may not be preceded by a dream. On waking up, you can’t move. You feel totally paralyzed with perhaps only your brain is functioning. Panic seizes you, as you attempt to move but cannot. Frantically you try to move any part of your body. In my experience the first to respond are the fingers and toes, then the limbs, and as blood begins to circulate perked by adrenaline, you find yourself finally “back to the living.”
Sleep paralysis is nature’s way of protecting us during our unconscious moments. Otherwise we become another Hercules who killed his wife and children in his sleep. This safeguard is not absolutely foul proof though. Take the case of sleepwalking and some cases of violence that occur during sleeping. Well, whatever way there is to assuage you, sleep paralysis really scares you to death. Just don’t give up.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Tips to prevent or minimize pollen allergy.
Tips to prevent or minimize pollen allergy.
Dr Abe V Rotor
Pollen Allergy is often the cause of sneezing fit and asthmatic symptoms.
Dr Abe V Rotor
It is true. It is called allergy rhinitis There are people who are highly sensitive to pollen grains. And their allergy is specific to certain plants, and at certain seasons these plants are in bloom. Plants belonging to Family Poaceae or Graminae which include rice, corn, wheat, sugarcane, talahib, cogon, and the like generally bloom in the last quarter beginning October when dry season the habagat season is about to end and dry season starts.
Here are things to do.
• Keep away from flowers and flowering plants
• Stay home to prevent exposure to pollen
• Avoid touching eyes and skin to prevent spread of allergy.
• Don’t bring in flowers and plants inside the house.
• Use mask and proper clothing.
There is a pollen calendar developed by the late Dr. Lolita Bulalacao of the National Museum, a pioneer in palynology (the study of pollen grains) in the Philippines. The calendar warns us people who are susceptible to allergy to keep away from pollen coming from certain flowering plants in season and from specific areas that may cause allergy. The symptoms of allergy rhinitis are generally relieved by antihistamine, which comes in different preparations and brands, as tablet or ointment. ~
Here are things to do.
• Keep away from flowers and flowering plants
• Stay home to prevent exposure to pollen
• Avoid touching eyes and skin to prevent spread of allergy.
• Don’t bring in flowers and plants inside the house.
• Use mask and proper clothing.
There is a pollen calendar developed by the late Dr. Lolita Bulalacao of the National Museum, a pioneer in palynology (the study of pollen grains) in the Philippines. The calendar warns us people who are susceptible to allergy to keep away from pollen coming from certain flowering plants in season and from specific areas that may cause allergy. The symptoms of allergy rhinitis are generally relieved by antihistamine, which comes in different preparations and brands, as tablet or ointment. ~
Red chicken meat, anyone?
Abe V Rotor
Chicken meat is always known as white meat. But some people like it red.
This is what old folks do it. Hold the head of the chicken with one hand, and the otherhand at the base of the neck. With one quick twist detach the skull from the first vertebral bone (atlas). The chicken is instantly killed without struggle.
The blood is not drained - unlike in conventional dressing – which explains the red meat of the chicken.
Living with Folk Wisdom, UST-AVR
Chicken meat is always known as white meat. But some people like it red.
This is what old folks do it. Hold the head of the chicken with one hand, and the otherhand at the base of the neck. With one quick twist detach the skull from the first vertebral bone (atlas). The chicken is instantly killed without struggle.
The blood is not drained - unlike in conventional dressing – which explains the red meat of the chicken.
Living with Folk Wisdom, UST-AVR
Is there such a thing as non-cash farming technology?
Abe V Rotor
“It is technology farmers do not have to pay cash for a non- cash input.”
This definition by Dr. H. T. Chang of the World Bank actually refers to good basic farm practices which is small farmers can carry out themselves- first, to save on production cost; and second, to improve production efficiency.
Non- cash technology, however, should not be regarded as alternative to cash input per se, but can be a substitute to some costly items. What is significant in the concept is that good farm practices can maximize the value of cash input.
The best examples are found right in all fundamental steps of good farming. Good seeds generally produce more yields under any condition. These means farmers must practice seed selection, and plant only certified seeds. Grains produced from poor seeds are not only few; they produce low milling recovery due to admixtures of different grain shape, size and maturity.
The labor-intensive characteristic of typical farms in Asia ideally provides for greater attention to enhance proper farm management. After all, the progressive farmer is one who prepares is land more thoroughly, manages his nursery better, water his field more cleanly and has better water control, mainly through his effort and those of his large family.
Non-cash technology extends further from mere saving on direct expenses. It is also based on innovative approaches. A rice-garlic combination has these components; the garlic crop “rides” on the remaining soil moisture and on the tillage of early rice crop; and rice straw is used to mulch garlic in order to reduce water loss and weed population.
Other popular examples of non-cash inputs are:
1. Use early maturing varieties to allow a second or third cropping.
2. Make use of solar energy in drying palay, corn and other farm products.
3. Follow precise timing of land preparation to turn up weeds to dry up. Plow them under to be decomposed to save on herbicide and laborious weeding
4. Prepare rows parallel to East-West direction to allow more solar exposure to enhance growth and yield.
5. Practice green manuring in place of or supplement to, commercial fertilizers.
6. Recycle farm residues like corn stovers, rice straw and peanut hay for livestock, and farm wastes for organic fertilizer.
7. Practice intercropping to reduce the spread and occurrence of pests and diseases, and to maximize the utilization of an input like fertilizer..
The revival of non-cash technology is generally recognized as a Third World innovation. It may lack the glamour and sophistication of modern agriculture, but it holds the key in solving many problems of small farms.
“It is technology farmers do not have to pay cash for a non- cash input.”
This definition by Dr. H. T. Chang of the World Bank actually refers to good basic farm practices which is small farmers can carry out themselves- first, to save on production cost; and second, to improve production efficiency.
Non- cash technology, however, should not be regarded as alternative to cash input per se, but can be a substitute to some costly items. What is significant in the concept is that good farm practices can maximize the value of cash input.
The best examples are found right in all fundamental steps of good farming. Good seeds generally produce more yields under any condition. These means farmers must practice seed selection, and plant only certified seeds. Grains produced from poor seeds are not only few; they produce low milling recovery due to admixtures of different grain shape, size and maturity.
The labor-intensive characteristic of typical farms in Asia ideally provides for greater attention to enhance proper farm management. After all, the progressive farmer is one who prepares is land more thoroughly, manages his nursery better, water his field more cleanly and has better water control, mainly through his effort and those of his large family.
Non-cash technology extends further from mere saving on direct expenses. It is also based on innovative approaches. A rice-garlic combination has these components; the garlic crop “rides” on the remaining soil moisture and on the tillage of early rice crop; and rice straw is used to mulch garlic in order to reduce water loss and weed population.
Other popular examples of non-cash inputs are:
1. Use early maturing varieties to allow a second or third cropping.
2. Make use of solar energy in drying palay, corn and other farm products.
3. Follow precise timing of land preparation to turn up weeds to dry up. Plow them under to be decomposed to save on herbicide and laborious weeding
4. Prepare rows parallel to East-West direction to allow more solar exposure to enhance growth and yield.
5. Practice green manuring in place of or supplement to, commercial fertilizers.
6. Recycle farm residues like corn stovers, rice straw and peanut hay for livestock, and farm wastes for organic fertilizer.
7. Practice intercropping to reduce the spread and occurrence of pests and diseases, and to maximize the utilization of an input like fertilizer..
The revival of non-cash technology is generally recognized as a Third World innovation. It may lack the glamour and sophistication of modern agriculture, but it holds the key in solving many problems of small farms.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Part 3: Development Communication - Teaching and Learning
Dr. Abe V. Rotor
Afro-Asian Institute, Tel-Aviv, Israel
(From the Lectures of Dr. Chanoch Jacobsen, Professors Shimon Zuckerman, Shulamit Elfassy, Michel Isaak, and Gershon Tabor)
Teaching is the art of changing people’s behavior by facilitating the learning process for them.
Learning is the process whereby new behavior patterns are acquired.
All the manifold ways in which a person can behave come from one of two possible sources: either they are inherited or they are learnt
Inherited behavior patterns are more or less fixed and almost impossible to change. On the other hand, anything that has been learnt can, in principle, be modified by further learning. It is difficult, of course, to uproot long-standing habits, but even those can be changed, provided they are correctly analyzed and appropriately handled.
By far the greatest part of our behavior consists of activities which we have learnt during our lives. In principle, most human activities can be modified by additional learning.
Knowledge is any information that a person has perceived through one of his five senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. It will be appropriate, therefore, to try and explain the learning of knowledge with the help of the principles of perception.
Skills are actions or activities that a person is able to perform rapidly and smoothly. There are motor skills (activities we carry out with our limbs), and mental skills, which are performed with the brain (e.g., solving mathematical problems). Acquisition of skills requires repetition of the activity, thus the use of learning principles - the dynamics of repetitive behavior, namely reinforcement theory.
Attitude is a person’s habitual patterns of thinking about his social environment. Attitudes are complex structures of the mind, made up of knowledge, beliefs, emotions and evaluations. Being habitual, they predispose people to make ready-made generalized responses to their social environment in many different circumstances. Attitudes are formed and changed with cognitive balance theory.
The Perception of Knowledge.
We perceive our environment selectively. We filter out certain things which we hear, see, smell, touch and taste.
Selective perception enables the organism to conserve its cognitive resources, taking note only of those stimuli that are interesting in themselves or are important to its well-being.
The human brain regulates the selective perception of environmental stimuli according to their relevance to the person’s needs, his expectations and his previous experience. In other words, we tend to perceive those things to which our senses are attuned.
To be effectively learnt, knowledge must be relevant to the learner.
Memory
The human brain not only perceives selectively, it also remembers selectively what it has perceived. Some things etch themselves on the mind, while others are quickly forgotten.
We tend to remember those items of knowledge, which we feel are relevant and important to ourselves.
When teaching link items to one another than to present them disconnectedly. Systematically ordered items make for better learning than haphazardly presented knowledge.
The successful communicator/teacher takes pains to explain things thoroughly, giving adequate reasons, rather than throwing knowledge at the learner as if to say “take it from me.”
Reinforcement of Skills
Based on principles of learning is that of reward of punishment (positive and negative reinforcement.) Common sense and ancient folk-wisdom would suggest the same thing: it is nothing else than the well-known idea of the carrot and the stick.
The extrinsic reinforcement may be either positive (e.g., praise encouragement, payment, etc.) or negative (e.g., scolding if he doesn’t practice, withholding of reward, etc.), but without either of these it is unlikely that a person will continue the activity long enough to acquire the skill. Note, however, that once the skill has been acquired it is frequently self-reinforcing, since normally a person will enjoy doing something he can do really well (self-actualization).
Positive reinforcement is more efficient than negative reinforcement, because it does not have to be given every time the behavior is emitted. In fact, irregular and intermittent schedules of positive reinforcement are even more efficient in maintaining the activity than regular and continuous rewards. It is as if the organism went on “hoping” - as it were (up to a certain limit, of course) than the next activity will be rewarded, and therefore keeps it up. Negative reinforcement, on the other hand, must be continuous and consistent to be effective.
The Cognitive Balance of Attitudes
The important point about habits is that we rarely think about them at all. From a psychological point of view, therefore, they function to conserve mental effort. As we can do these things by habit we do not have to think about them and our mind is left free to deal with those matters that do need the investment of mental effort.
Attitudes are generalizations, and like all generalizations they are frequently not very accurate, and sometimes they can be quite unrealistic. But they do save us the trouble of carefully considering each and every event or idea that comes our way.
They also provide us with ready-made responses for a host of different social situations with which we may be confronted.
If our attitudes are to give us this kind of psychological support, they must be consistent with one another as well as with our personal experience. This is what we mean by cognitive balance. We feel uncomfortable when we are faced with facts which obviously contradict our attitudes, and we take considerable trouble to prevent this from happening.
Sometimes we attempt to change the facts by adjusting our behavior to our attitudes and thus restore cognitive balance. At other times we adjust our attitudes to bring them in line with our experience.
Generally, we take the line of least resistance. We tend to do what seem easiest in order to maintain our cognitive balance.
Learning attitudes and changing attitudes depends on the real-life situations. Being habits upon which we are accustomed to depend, we do not change our attitudes easily.
But we do change them when we feel we must, when we are faced with the realities of our personal experience.
The communicator and extension worker who wants to change other people’s attitudes should know that his powers in this area are severely restricted.
We communicators and educators can provide learning experience, but we can not change the attitudes directly.
Only life itself can do that.
Dr. A.V. Rotor
Afro-Asian Institute
Tel-Aviv, Israel
Afro-Asian Institute, Tel-Aviv, Israel
(From the Lectures of Dr. Chanoch Jacobsen, Professors Shimon Zuckerman, Shulamit Elfassy, Michel Isaak, and Gershon Tabor)
“They will tell us we can’t change human nature. That is one of the oldest excuses in the world of doing nothing – and it isn’t true.”
JB Priestley
Teaching is the art of changing people’s behavior by facilitating the learning process for them.
Learning is the process whereby new behavior patterns are acquired.
All the manifold ways in which a person can behave come from one of two possible sources: either they are inherited or they are learnt
Inherited behavior patterns are more or less fixed and almost impossible to change. On the other hand, anything that has been learnt can, in principle, be modified by further learning. It is difficult, of course, to uproot long-standing habits, but even those can be changed, provided they are correctly analyzed and appropriately handled.
By far the greatest part of our behavior consists of activities which we have learnt during our lives. In principle, most human activities can be modified by additional learning.
Knowledge is any information that a person has perceived through one of his five senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. It will be appropriate, therefore, to try and explain the learning of knowledge with the help of the principles of perception.
Skills are actions or activities that a person is able to perform rapidly and smoothly. There are motor skills (activities we carry out with our limbs), and mental skills, which are performed with the brain (e.g., solving mathematical problems). Acquisition of skills requires repetition of the activity, thus the use of learning principles - the dynamics of repetitive behavior, namely reinforcement theory.
Attitude is a person’s habitual patterns of thinking about his social environment. Attitudes are complex structures of the mind, made up of knowledge, beliefs, emotions and evaluations. Being habitual, they predispose people to make ready-made generalized responses to their social environment in many different circumstances. Attitudes are formed and changed with cognitive balance theory.
The Perception of Knowledge.
We perceive our environment selectively. We filter out certain things which we hear, see, smell, touch and taste.
Selective perception enables the organism to conserve its cognitive resources, taking note only of those stimuli that are interesting in themselves or are important to its well-being.
The human brain regulates the selective perception of environmental stimuli according to their relevance to the person’s needs, his expectations and his previous experience. In other words, we tend to perceive those things to which our senses are attuned.
To be effectively learnt, knowledge must be relevant to the learner.
Memory
The human brain not only perceives selectively, it also remembers selectively what it has perceived. Some things etch themselves on the mind, while others are quickly forgotten.
We tend to remember those items of knowledge, which we feel are relevant and important to ourselves.
When teaching link items to one another than to present them disconnectedly. Systematically ordered items make for better learning than haphazardly presented knowledge.
The successful communicator/teacher takes pains to explain things thoroughly, giving adequate reasons, rather than throwing knowledge at the learner as if to say “take it from me.”
Reinforcement of Skills
Based on principles of learning is that of reward of punishment (positive and negative reinforcement.) Common sense and ancient folk-wisdom would suggest the same thing: it is nothing else than the well-known idea of the carrot and the stick.
The extrinsic reinforcement may be either positive (e.g., praise encouragement, payment, etc.) or negative (e.g., scolding if he doesn’t practice, withholding of reward, etc.), but without either of these it is unlikely that a person will continue the activity long enough to acquire the skill. Note, however, that once the skill has been acquired it is frequently self-reinforcing, since normally a person will enjoy doing something he can do really well (self-actualization).
Positive reinforcement is more efficient than negative reinforcement, because it does not have to be given every time the behavior is emitted. In fact, irregular and intermittent schedules of positive reinforcement are even more efficient in maintaining the activity than regular and continuous rewards. It is as if the organism went on “hoping” - as it were (up to a certain limit, of course) than the next activity will be rewarded, and therefore keeps it up. Negative reinforcement, on the other hand, must be continuous and consistent to be effective.
The Cognitive Balance of Attitudes
The important point about habits is that we rarely think about them at all. From a psychological point of view, therefore, they function to conserve mental effort. As we can do these things by habit we do not have to think about them and our mind is left free to deal with those matters that do need the investment of mental effort.
Attitudes are generalizations, and like all generalizations they are frequently not very accurate, and sometimes they can be quite unrealistic. But they do save us the trouble of carefully considering each and every event or idea that comes our way.
They also provide us with ready-made responses for a host of different social situations with which we may be confronted.
If our attitudes are to give us this kind of psychological support, they must be consistent with one another as well as with our personal experience. This is what we mean by cognitive balance. We feel uncomfortable when we are faced with facts which obviously contradict our attitudes, and we take considerable trouble to prevent this from happening.
Sometimes we attempt to change the facts by adjusting our behavior to our attitudes and thus restore cognitive balance. At other times we adjust our attitudes to bring them in line with our experience.
Generally, we take the line of least resistance. We tend to do what seem easiest in order to maintain our cognitive balance.
Learning attitudes and changing attitudes depends on the real-life situations. Being habits upon which we are accustomed to depend, we do not change our attitudes easily.
But we do change them when we feel we must, when we are faced with the realities of our personal experience.
The communicator and extension worker who wants to change other people’s attitudes should know that his powers in this area are severely restricted.
We communicators and educators can provide learning experience, but we can not change the attitudes directly.
Only life itself can do that.
Dr. A.V. Rotor
Afro-Asian Institute
Tel-Aviv, Israel
Development Communication: Applied Communication at the Grassroots
Development Communication:
Applied Communication at the Grassroots
Dr. Abe V. Rotor*
Afro-Asian Institute, Tel-Aviv, Israel
(From the Lectures of Dr. Chanoch Jacobsen, Professors Shimon Zuckerman,
Shulamit Elfassy, Michel Isaak, and Gershon Tabor)
“A genuine meeting of minds may result if both parties in interest will concede to the other side the honor of believing, at least as an initial assumption, that its point of view is not merely vicious or silly.”
- George H. Sabine
The four basic elements in every communication processThe communication source, the person whose ideas or meanings are to be transferred to another person.
communication receiver, the person/s to whom the ideas or meaning are to be transferred.
message which can be transferred from the source to the receiver.
the message has to travel through a channel or medium in order to successfully make the passage from source to receiver.
The six steps or stages in the process
Stage 1: Creation
The person as the communication source conceives of an idea which he wants to transmit to someone else. Clear yourself about what you want to communicate. Only when the source knows clearly what he wants to communicate is it likely that the receiver will understand him.
Stage 2: Encoding
Meanings and ideas are structures of the mind. Encode your ideas into symbols which you are sure will be correctly understood by the receiver.
Stage 3: Transmission
An idea or meaning which has been encoded into symbols is called a message. The word symbols have to be either spoken, or written and displayed; the gestures have to be shown; the music has to be performed, and so on with other symbols.
Stage 4: Reception
Environmental conditions have a direct bearing on fidelity. But beyond that, fidelity depends on which and how many of the receiver’s five senses are activated to receive the message: seeing, hearing, touching, tasting or smelling. (The fidelity of our senses is in this order.)
Stage 5: Decoding
The receiver, having received the encoded message, must now decode it in order to comprehend its meaning. One can not decode a message whose symbols one does not recognize. It does happen that we receive messages which seem incomprehensible to us, as when someone speaks to us in language we do not know. In such cases we usually try to communicate to the source that we do not understand him
Stage 6: Assimilation (final stage in the simple one-way communication process)
In order to “ make sense” of the decoded message, to understand it, the receiver must relate it to what he already knows and assimilate it within the total information available to him. The more life experience a person has had, the more likely it is that his store of knowledge will contain elements with which he can make sense out of a new ideas and meanings.
To summarize, the communication process involves four basic elements and six stages.
The four elements are: 1.) The source, 2.) The receiver, 3.) The message, and 4.) The channel.
The six stages of the process are: 1.) Creation, 2.) Encoding 3.) Transmission, 4.) Reception, 5.) Decoding, 6.) Assimilation
At the core of all extension work lies the process of communication. Indeed, the very term “extension work” was chosen by its originators to convey the idea of communication lines extending beyond the boundaries of the universities to include the rural population in the surrounding countryside, and urban marginal communities.
All extension workers, however diverse their specific fields of expertise maybe, must be highly skilled communicators, because they stand and work at a crucial intersection of a widespread communication network. This network encompasses the rural population, the various service centers in towns and cities such as markets, supplies, experiment stations, educational facilities, and local as well as governmental agencies. ~
_____________
* The author attended a seminar on agriculture and land reform at the Afro Asian Institute, Tel Aviv, in 1992
Part 2 - Communication and Human Behavior: Motives and Needs
“It is harder to understand the behavior of human beings than to understand that of the atoms.”
When a person acts in order to achieve some purpose, we say that his behavior is goal- oriented, or that he is motivated. But human motivation is a complicated matter. People are not always aware of the motives for their own behavior - let alone that of others
Survival Needs
The most basic level, physiological needs, namely all those things which a human body needs to survive as a living organism - food, drink, shelter, sleep, air to breathe, etc. As long as any of these needs remains unsatisfied, a person will not worry about other needs. Once the survival needs have been relatively well met, the next level of needs emerges and becomes felt. They are the safety or security needs.
Security Needs
When we have sufficient food, drink and the other necessities of life, our primary concern becomes self- protection. Normally, a person will avoid situations and places where he is likely to get hurt. He will frequently also take steps to secure his future from a possible lack of the basic necessities. We build houses, store food, buy insurance policies - in short, we respond to a need for physical security. That is how this group of needs is expressed in our daily life. Only when the more basic needs for survival are not satisfied do we willingly take risks or endanger ourselves to supply them
We build houses, store food, buy insurance policies - in short, we respond to a need for physical security. That is how this group of needs is expressed in our daily life. Only when the more basic needs for survival are not satisfied do we willingly take risks or endanger ourselves to supply them.
Affiliation Needs
Once the needs for survival and security are sufficiently met, we become aware of affiliation and belongings needs (security needs), but in the sense of emotional rather than physical security. We need to feel accepted by the people around us for our emotional stability. To be rejected, isolated or ignored by society is commonly felt as a form of deprivation.
We therefore act in ways that make other people like us and accept us. Unlike the first groups of needs, which are of a biological nature, affiliation needs are clearly social. No one can satisfy these needs by himself: he needs a social group to which he can belong and which accepts him.
If we are appreciated and admired we feel self-confident and capable. On the other hand, if others look down upon us, not only do we tend to feel hurt and insulted, but we also begin to think of ourselves as inferior, weak and incompetent. If others look down upon us, not only do we tend to feel hurt and insulted, but we also begin to think of ourselves as inferior, weak and incompetent.
Self-Actualization Needs
“What a man can be, he must be.” It is common to see this need expressed among artists and other creative people, but it is in fact universal. Even a child who has mastered a new skill will feel this need for self-actualization. It is the same with most of us: we need to do what we think we can do well.
Unfortunately, for many people in the world, survival needs and security needs are only barely satisfied, hunger and physical danger being only just around the corner. In such circumstances no normal person will worry about self-actualization, or about esteem and affiliation, for that matter. But give the people enough to eat, shelter and physical security, and the higher levels of needs are bound to appear.
Conclusion
In communication at the grassroots, an understanding of people’s motivation can help us in at least two kinds of situation:
- Albert Einstein
When a person acts in order to achieve some purpose, we say that his behavior is goal- oriented, or that he is motivated. But human motivation is a complicated matter. People are not always aware of the motives for their own behavior - let alone that of others
Survival Needs
The most basic level, physiological needs, namely all those things which a human body needs to survive as a living organism - food, drink, shelter, sleep, air to breathe, etc. As long as any of these needs remains unsatisfied, a person will not worry about other needs. Once the survival needs have been relatively well met, the next level of needs emerges and becomes felt. They are the safety or security needs.
Security Needs
When we have sufficient food, drink and the other necessities of life, our primary concern becomes self- protection. Normally, a person will avoid situations and places where he is likely to get hurt. He will frequently also take steps to secure his future from a possible lack of the basic necessities. We build houses, store food, buy insurance policies - in short, we respond to a need for physical security. That is how this group of needs is expressed in our daily life. Only when the more basic needs for survival are not satisfied do we willingly take risks or endanger ourselves to supply them
We build houses, store food, buy insurance policies - in short, we respond to a need for physical security. That is how this group of needs is expressed in our daily life. Only when the more basic needs for survival are not satisfied do we willingly take risks or endanger ourselves to supply them.
Affiliation Needs
Once the needs for survival and security are sufficiently met, we become aware of affiliation and belongings needs (security needs), but in the sense of emotional rather than physical security. We need to feel accepted by the people around us for our emotional stability. To be rejected, isolated or ignored by society is commonly felt as a form of deprivation.
We therefore act in ways that make other people like us and accept us. Unlike the first groups of needs, which are of a biological nature, affiliation needs are clearly social. No one can satisfy these needs by himself: he needs a social group to which he can belong and which accepts him.
If we are appreciated and admired we feel self-confident and capable. On the other hand, if others look down upon us, not only do we tend to feel hurt and insulted, but we also begin to think of ourselves as inferior, weak and incompetent. If others look down upon us, not only do we tend to feel hurt and insulted, but we also begin to think of ourselves as inferior, weak and incompetent.
Self-Actualization Needs
“What a man can be, he must be.” It is common to see this need expressed among artists and other creative people, but it is in fact universal. Even a child who has mastered a new skill will feel this need for self-actualization. It is the same with most of us: we need to do what we think we can do well.
Unfortunately, for many people in the world, survival needs and security needs are only barely satisfied, hunger and physical danger being only just around the corner. In such circumstances no normal person will worry about self-actualization, or about esteem and affiliation, for that matter. But give the people enough to eat, shelter and physical security, and the higher levels of needs are bound to appear.
Conclusion
In communication at the grassroots, an understanding of people’s motivation can help us in at least two kinds of situation:
- when we want to help people, and
- when we want them to change their behavior.
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