A need is an objectively measurable, unavoidable, and enduring human state. When a need is not met, people feel unsatisfied or frustrated. This is the opposite of a want, which is an objectively measurable, avoidable, and transient state. For example, children might say that they need a new toy for their birthday, or adults might say that they need a vacation to get over the stress of work. Similarly, flood victims might say that they need assistance, or employees might say that they need to stay late to finish an urgent project.
Needs are a central topic of research in the fields of psychology, philosophy, biology, economics, sociology, and social work. They are also the underlying basis of many of our everyday actions and decisions. People seek to satisfy their needs in the most efficient way possible, balancing short-term satisfactions against long-term benefits. They also seek to avoid frustrations that can undermine their motivation, wellbeing and sense of control. The prevailing scientific view of needs is that they play an essential role in defining and sustaining people’s well-being.
The basic psychological needs theory (BPNT) identifies three distinct, universally relevant psychological needs: 1. the need for physiological stability (e.g., food, water, shelter) 2. the need for relatedness (e.g., friendship, family) 3. and the need for autonomy (e.g., freedom to make choices) (Ryan et al. 2017). BPNT also claims that the benefits and costs of need satisfactions and frustrations are pervasive, encompassing a wide range of outcomes at all levels of analysis from individual to societal, and across various domains of functioning.
For example, researchers have found that a person’s experience of need satisfaction and frustration reliably predicts a variety of ill-being indicators, such as stress (Campbell et al. 2017), depressive symptoms (Cordeiro et al. 2016), and anxiety (Ng et al. 2012), and that they occur at the level of both (relatively stable) between-person differences and within-person fluctuations across time, with monthly, weekly, daily, and even hourly variations in need frustration co-varying with corresponding fluctuations in ill-being. These findings, combined with a number of mechanistic correlates, suggest that the current psychological needs are fundamental and highly functional (Associated Criterion #1).
An important next step is to develop more reliable self-report measures of need thwarting conditions and need frustrating experiences, and to broaden the scope of research into these needs to encompass a greater array of ill-being and motivational outcomes. Furthermore, future studies using longitudinal designs will help to further establish whether a person’s experienced need frustration plays a key role in actualizing their potential for psychopathology and awakening vulnerabilities for psychopathology. Finally, it will be important to determine if the proposed need-candidate experiences of novelty and variety are associated with similar benefits and costs as the currently established needs, and whether they differ in their effects over time. If so, it would be interesting to examine if these additional facets of the need for variety and novelty serve unique functions that are distinct from the more universally applicable feelings of relatedness and autonomy.