Wellness and Fairness: Two Core Values for Humanistic Psychology

Although principles of wellness and fairness have informed the core values of the humanistic movement, humanistic psychologists have not explicitly identified these concepts as essential to their goals. Wellness is a positive state of affairs brought about by the satisfaction of needs in 6 domains of life: Interpersonal, Community, Occupational, Psychological, Physical, and Economic. On the other hand, fairness includes distributive and procedural types that pertain, respectively, to the distribution of outcomes and the processes used to arrive at them. We argue that psychological thriving requires a set of synergistic conditions consisting of both wellness and fairness and discuss the need to make these implicit roles explicit in humanistic psychology. We argue that wellness and fairness can provide a useful tool for humanistic psychologists to advance self-actualization in individuals and in society at large.