Robert Hinde

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Robert Aubrey Hinde (born October 26, 1923 in Norwich , England , † December 23, 2016 ) was a British behavioral scientist . Until his retirement he was professor in the field of zoology at Cambridge University and was considered one of the most important British behavioral biologists.

Together with Nikolaas Tinbergen , Patrick Bateson and William Thorpe , he made a significant contribution to establishing the still young biological field of behavioral biology in Great Britain after the Second World War.

Career

Robert Hinde was the oldest of his parents' four children; his father was a doctor specializing in obstetrics. Hinde attended the Oundle School boarding school from 1935 to 1940 , where even then a well-founded natural history education was important. From 1940 to 1945 he was a pilot in the Royal Air Force's Coastal Command ; trained in Southern Rhodesia and South Africa , he drove “Catalina” and Sunderland flying boats. After military service, he first studied zoology, chemistry and physiology at St John's College in Cambridge from 1946 - a. a. with William Thorpe - and earned a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree . He graduated from the University of London in 1948 with a Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.). He then accepted an offer from David Lack and went to Oxford .

From 1948 to 1950, Hinde worked as a research assistant at the Edward Gray Institute (Department of Zoology) and at Balliol College in Oxford , where he was awarded a Dr. phil. received his doctorate. At this time he was officially a member of the working group of the ecologist David Lack, but he was professionally supervised by Nikolaas Tinbergen , who had moved from the Netherlands to the University of Oxford in 1949 . From 1950 to 1954, Hinde was initially curator of the Ornithological Field Research Station of the University of Cambridge in Madingley, later deputy director of the Sub-Department of Animal Behavior in Cambridge. From 1951 to 1994 he was a member of the faculty at St John's College (Cambridge), most recently as a master's . From 1963 to 1989 he was also a Royal Society Research Professor .

Research topics

In his early work, Robert Hinde analyzed, among other things, the courtship and conflict behavior of birds; in particular he analyzed the warning calls of chaffinches after sighting predators. His observations showed that the behavior of the chaffinches cannot be described with the help of the instinct theory formulated by Konrad Lorenz , which is why he has since found the “psychohydraulic instinct model” of motivation, which was popular in specialist circles, to be generally unsuitable. Due to his examination of the phenomenon of imprinting (a collaborative work with William Thorpe) and influenced by the psychoanalyst and pioneer of attachment research, John Bowlby , he turned to the individual development of primates as early as the 1950s . At the end of the 1950s he established a colony of rhesus monkeys and investigated, among other things, the consequences of a brief separation of the mother monkeys from their offspring on the behavior of both. In general, he was interested in the analysis of the innate foundations of social behavior and how personal relationships between individual animals develop and change. Therefore, at the request of Louis Leakey, he was also an advisor to Dian Fossey's research on wild gorillas in Rwanda and to Jane Goodall's studies on chimpanzees .

One consequence of his research was that Hinde was also increasingly concerned with how social contacts develop within groups of people (family, friends); his studies now dealt mainly with three to six year old children. In this way he contributed to combining ethological research approaches with psychological ones.

Robert Hinde published a widely used textbook on behavioral research in 1966 and later numerous publications on the subject of war dangers and strategies for peace, most recently in 2003 together with the Nobel Peace Prize winner Joseph Rotblat the book War, no more .

His Cambridge email address was the official point of contact for the British Pugwash group .

Honors, prizes and memberships (selection)

Fonts (selection)

  • Ethological models and the concept of 'drive'. In: The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. Volume 6, No. 24, 1956, pp. 321-331, doi: 10.1093 / bjps / VI.24.321 .
  • Energy models of motivation. In: Symposium of the Society for Experimental Biology. Volume 14, 1960, pp. 199-213. PMID 13714429 .
  • Animal Behavior. A Synthesis of Ethology and Comparative Psychology. McGraw-Hill, New York 1966 (2nd edition 1970).
  • Bird Vocalizations: Their Relations to Current Problems in Biology and Psychology. Cambridge University Press, 1969, ISBN 978-0-521-07409-4 .
  • Biological Basis of Human Social Behavior. McGraw-Hill, New York 1974, ISBN 0-07-028932-8 .
  • Towards Understanding Relationships. Academic Press, New York 1979, ISBN 0-12-349252-1 .
  • Animal signals: Ethological and games-theory approaches are not incompatible. In: Animal Behavior. Volume 29, No. 2, 1981, pp. 535-542, doi: 10.1016 / S0003-3472 (81) 80116-9 .
  • Primate Social Relationships: An Integrated Approach. Sinauer Associates, Sunderland (Massachusetts) 1983, ISBN 0-87893-276-3 .
  • Cooperation and prosocial behavior. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1991, ISBN 0-521-39110-5 .
  • The institution of war. St. Martin's Press, New York 1992, ISBN 0-312-06611-2 .
  • Relationships: a dialectical perspective. Psychological Press, Hove, East Sussex 1997, ISBN 0-86377-706-6 .
  • War, no more: eliminating conflict in the nuclear age. Pluto Press, London 2003, ISBN 0-7453-2192-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Obituary notice on telegraph.co.uk ( Memento from December 31, 2016 in the Internet Archive ).
  2. ^ Curriculum vitae Robert A. Hinde. At: psychology.sunysb.edu , accessed January 2, 2017
  3. ^ Rober A. Hinde: Ethology in Relation to Other Disciplines. In: Donald A. Dewsbury: Studying Animal Behavior. Autobiographies of the Founders. Chicago University Press, Chicago and London 1985, ISBN 978-0-226-14410-8 , pp. 192-203.
  4. ^ Rober A. Hinde: Ethology in Relation to Other Disciplines, p. 195.
personal data
SURNAME Hinde, Robert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hinde, Robert Aubrey (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British behaviorist and author
DATE OF BIRTH October 26, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Norwich , England
DATE OF DEATH December 23, 2016