Golden hammer

A golden hammer is any tool, technology, paradigm, snake oil or similar whose proponents enthusiastically sing its praises. They predict that it will solve multiple problems, including some for which it is obviously not suitable. Likewise, a literal golden hammer would look highly impressive but would be no better (and quite possibly worse) than a hammer made of cheaper materials.
Also called the law of the instrument.
History
The sentiment (that people look for cure-alls) is likely traditional; see panacea. Likewise, the use of a hammer and nail as imagery are likely as old as hammers and nails, or even the use of rocks as tools, which the hammer evokes.
In modern philosophy and psychology, phrased by Abraham Kaplan, , 1964, page 28:
: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.
Popularly phrased as "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" and variants thereof. This form is perhaps due to Abraham Maslow, The Psychology of Science, 1966, [http://books.google.com/books?id3_40fK8PW6QC&printsecfrontcover#PPT7,M1 p. 15]:
:I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.
Also attributed to Bernard Baruch, Michael Polanyi, and Mark Twain.
In this form, more specifically means: once you have a tool that works for one task, you want to use it for everything just because it's available, and because you have already developed the skills to use it; this was also Kaplan's sense.
Related phenomena
Other forms of narrow-minded instrumentalism include: déformation professionnelle, a French term for "looking at things from the point of view of one's profession", and regulatory capture, the tendency for regulators to look at things from the point of view of the profession they are regulating.
The opposite of using a golden hammer would be using the "right tool for the job".

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