You take a group of people, and you arrange them one way and they're healthy and innovative and cooperative and kind, or you take the same people and you arrange them a different way and they're unhealthy and uncooperative and unkind.
The needs for safety, belongingness, love relations and for respect can be satisfied only by other people, i.e., only from outside the person. This means considerable dependence on the environment. A person in this dependent position cannot really be said to be governing himself, or in control of his own fate. He must be beholden to the sources of supply of needed gratifications. ….
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He is the dependent variable; the environment is the fixed, independent variable. Because of this, the deficiency-motivated man must be more afraid of the environment, since there is always the possibility that it may fail or disappoint him.