Golden Hammer

The concept known as the law of the instrument, Maslow's hammer (or gavel), or a golden hammer is an over-reliance on a familiar tool; as Abraham Maslow said in 1966, "I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."

The first recorded statement of the concept was Abraham Kaplan's, in 1964: "I call it the law of the instrument, and it may be formulated as follows: Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding."

Maslow's hammer, popularly phrased as "" and variants thereof, is from Abraham Maslow's The Psychology of Science, published in 1966.

It has also been called the law of the hammer, attributed both to Maslow and to Kaplan. The hammer and nail metaphor may not be original to Kaplan or Maslow. The English expression "a Birmingham screwdriver" meaning a hammer, references the habit of using the one tool for all purposes, and predates both Kaplan and Maslow by at least a century. The concept has also been attributed to Mark Twain, though there is no documentation of this origin in Twain's published writings.

Under the name of "Baruch's Observation", it is also attributed to the stock market speculator and author Bernard M. Baruch.

One application of Law of the Instrument is the usage of antipsychotic drugs. During Maslow's era, only stelazine and thorazine were available, so every mental illness was treated as if it were a psychosis, as in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest.

In his 2003 book, Of Paradise and Power, historian Robert Kagan suggested a corollary to the law: "When you don't have a hammer, you don't want anything to look like a nail." According to Kagan, the corollary explains the difference in views on the use of military force the United States and Europe have held since the end of World War 2.

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