History
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 "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" 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.
Read more about this topic: Law Of The Instrument
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