Self-actualizing people can all be described as relatively spontaneous in behavior and far more spontaneous than that in their inner life, thoughts, impulses, etc. Their behavior is marked by simplicity and naturalness, and by lack of artificiality or straining for effect. This does not necessarily mean consistently unconventional behavior. If we were to take an actual count of the number of times that the self-actualizing person behaved in an unconventional manner, the tally would not be to high. His unconventionality is not superficial but essential or internal. It is his impulses, thought, consciousness that are so unusually unconventional, spontaneous, and natural. Apparently recognizing that the world of people in which he lives could not understand or accept this, and since he has no wish to hurt them or to fight with them over every triviality he will go through the ceremonies and rituals of convention with a good humored shrug and with the best possible grace. Thus I have seen a man accept an "honor" he laughed at and even despised in private, rather than make an issue of it and hurt the people who thought they were pleasing him.

That this "conventionality" is a cloak which rests very lightly upon his shoulders and is easily cast aside can be seen from the fact that the self-actualizing person practically never allows convention to hamper him, or inhibit him from doing anything that he considers very important or basic. It is at such moments that his essential lack of conventionality appears and not as with the average Bohemian or authority-rebel who makes great issues of trivial things and who will fight against some unimportant regulation as if it were a world issue.

This same inner attitude can also be seen in those moments when the person becomes keenly absorbed in something that is close to one of his main interests. He can then be seen quite casually to drop off all sorts of rules of behavior to which at other times he conforms, as if he were conventional voluntarily and by design.

Finally this external habit of behavior can be voluntarily dropped when in the company of people who do not demand or expect routine behavior. That this relative control of behavior is felt as something of a burden is seen by our subjects' preference for such company as allows them to be more free, natural, and spontaneous and which relieves them of what they find sometimes to be effortful conduct.

One consequence or correlate of this characteristic is that these people have codes of ethics which are relatively autonomous and individual rather than conventional. The unthinking observer might sometimes believe them to be "unethical," since they can break not only conventions but laws when the situation seems to demand it. But the very opposite is the case. They are the most ethical of people, even though their ethics are not necessarily the same as those of the people around them. It is this kind of observation which leads us to understand very assuredly that the ordinary "ethical" behavior of the average person is largely conventional behavior rather than truly ethical behavior, i.e., behavior based on fundamentally accepted principles.

Because of this alienation from ordinary conventions, and from the ordinarily accepted hypocrisies, lies, and inconsistencies of social life, they sometimes feel like spies, or aliens in a foreign land, and sometimes behave so.

I should not give the impression that they try to hide what they are like. Sometimes they let themselves go deliberately, out of momentary irritation with customary rigidity or with conventional blindness. They may, for instance, be trying to teach someone, or they may be trying to protect someone from hurt or injustice, or they may sometimes find emotions bubbling up from within them which are so pleasant or even ecstatic that it seems almost sacrilegious to suppress them. In such instances I have observed that they are not anxious or guilty or ashamed of the impression that they make on the onlooker. It is their claim that they usually behave in a conventional fashion simply because no great issues are involved or because they know people will be hurt or embarrassed by any other kind of behavior.

Their ease of penetration to reality, their closer approach to an animal like or child-like acceptance and spontaneity imply a superior awareness of their own impulses, desires, opinions, and subjective reactions in general. Clinical study of this capacity confirms beyond a doubt the opinion, that the average "normal," "welladjusted" person often hasn't the slightest idea of what he is, of what he wants, of what his own opinions are.

It was such findings as these that led ultimately to the discovery of a most profound difference between self-actualizing people and others, namely, that the motivational life of self-actualizing people is not only quantitatively different, but also qualitatively different, from that of ordinary people. It seems probable that we must construct a profoundly different psychology of motivation for self-actualizing people, i.e., expression—or growth-motivation— rather than deficiency-motivation. Indeed, it may turn out to be more fruitful to consider the concept of "motivation" to apply only to non-self-actualizers. Our subjects no longer "strive" in the ordinary sense but rather "develop." They attempt to grow to perfection and to develop more and more fully in their own style. The motivation of ordinary men is a striving for the basic need gratification which they lack. But self-actualizing people in fact lack none of these gratifications. And yet they have impulses. They work, they try, and they are ambitious, even though in an unusual sense. For them motivation is just character growth, character-expression, maturation and development—in a word, self-actualization. Could these self-actualizing people be more human, more revealing of the "original nature" of the species, closer to the "species type" in the taxonomical sense? Ought a biological species to be judged by its crippled, warped, only partially developed specimens, or by examples that have been over domesticated, caged, and trained?