 3. Toward an Integrative Theory of Motivation, Personality, and Development 85
Why These Three Basic Needs?
The newborn, after floating happily in a fa -
miliar environment in which all needs are 
automatically met, arrives in its new world 
knowing almost nothing about it. Steps 
need to be taken, and quickly. Infants need 
to know what their new world is like and 
what they can expect in it: what is in this 
world, what these things do, what goes with 
what, what follows what. This is the need 
for prediction.  Next, they need to learn how 
to act in or on their world—how to make 
good things happen and how to avoid or 
escape from unpleasant things. This is the 
need for competence.  Yet there is a long pe -
riod of time in which they cannot do much 
of anything very well. Although, as you will 
see, infants are amazingly smart, they are in -
credibly inept when it comes to doing. This 
means that they must rely on others, and 
they need these others to accept and care for 
them. This is the need for acceptance.
For acceptance, prediction, and compe -
tence, you will see that the need (or some 
early form of it) is there just about from birth and that infants come well prepared 
to pursue each of these needs. They have 
built-in attentional mechanisms, inferential 
and representational abilities, and emotional 
and behavioral capacities that orient them 
toward need-  relevant information and that 
allow them to pursue need-  fulfilling goals 
and learn from their experiences. Indeed, 
this tremendous preparedness confirms the 
importance of these needs from the very be -
ginning of life.
It is important to acknowledge that the 
three basic needs are not entirely distinct. 
For example, the need for prediction and the 
need for competence may sometimes bleed 
together. Yet for the purpose of understand -
ing personality development, it is useful to 
view them as distinct, then see how they later 
come together to form new needs. As I noted 
earlier, it is also important to acknowledge 
that physical and psychological needs are 
not always distinct. Both are necessary for 
survival and can serve each other. Yet for the 
purpose of understanding personality devel -
opment, I focus on psychological needs.Contr
ol
Self-Esteem, StatusTrust
CompetenceAcceptance
PredictabilitySelf-
Coher ence
FIGURE 3.1.  The seven needs, consisting of (1) three basic needs (acceptance, predictability, and com -
petence); (2) three compound or emergent needs (trust, control, and self-  esteem/status), each formed 
by the conjunction of two basic needs; and (3) a final emergent need, self-  coherence, at the intersection 
of all the other needs. Reprinted, with permission from the American Psychological Association, from 
Dweck (2017).