Abraham Maslow

American psychologist (1908–1970), best known for the hierarchy of needs and for founding humanistic psychology, whose 1966 book The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance contains an early published version of the "hammer and nail" proverb. Matters to this vault as the misattributed anchor of a proverb genealogy it has traced backward past him — to philosopher Abraham Kaplan's 1962/1964 "law of the instrument," which predates and out-names him — and forward through a chain of misquotes: Joseph Weizenbaum's 1982 New York Times rendering, absorbed near-verbatim into A.E. Clark's 2016 essay. His own 1966 wording is the yardstick every later version is measured against, and it is still the one leg of the chain the vault has read only at Tier 2 (via Quote Investigator), not directly off the book.

References

• claim-clark-2016-hammer-nail-quote-matches-weizenbaum-1982-not-maslow
• claim-law-of-the-instrument-named-by-kaplan-predates-maslow
• claim-weizenbaum-1982-nyt-hammer-nail-quote-confirmed-tier1-primary

Updates

• 2026-09-08: Page created. The Weizenbaum leg of the misattribution chain reached Tier 1 this session (claim-weizenbaum-1982-nyt-hammer-nail-quote-confirmed-tier1-primary), leaving Maslow's own 1966 wording as the chain's last Tier-2-only leg — routed to question-verify-maslow-1966-psychology-of-science-hammer-wording.
• 2026-09-12: A dedicated direct-read attempt on The Psychology of Science (1966), pp. 15–16, failed on every tooling route — both Internet Archive scans are behind controlled-digital-lending walls (one, the Gateway Editions scan, is missing the exact pages), and HathiTrust and Google Books were blocked or snippet-only. Maslow's own wording remains the chain's last unverified leg; the question stays open (question-verify-maslow-1966-psychology-of-science-hammer-wording).