Robert Hinde

Robert Aubrey Hinde (26 October 1923 – 23 December 2016) was a British zoologist, ethologist and psychologist.

He served as the Emeritus Royal Society Research Professor of Zoology at the University of Cambridge.

Hinde is best known for his ethological contributions to the fields of animal behaviour and developmental psychology.

Hinde was born in Norwich, the county town of Norfolk, England, on 26 October 1923, to Ernest and Isabella Hinde.

Ernest was a medical doctor whose family was independently wealthy through the textile trade; although World War I would impact the textile branch of the Hinde family, Ernest's immediate family unit, which included Robert's older siblings John and Isobel, would remain well-off due to his medical degree.

The family had a keen interest in the natural sciences that included long mountainous hikes, which allowed Hinde to develop an interest in birdwatching.

At 14, Hinde attended Oundle School, an all-boys boarding school in the market town of Oundle in Northamptonshire.

At Oundle, Hinde was encouraged out of the natural sciences and into the "harder sciences", such as chemistry.

Although he would return to the natural sciences, Hinde would later credit this formal training in the physical sciences for shaping the way that he approached his career in zoology, ethology, and psychology.

Hinde joined the Royal Air Force in 1940 at the age of 17, one year after England declared war on Germany.

He had been in the Officers’ Training Corp while at Oundle, and when he was called up in the RAF, Hinde was sent to the Air Crew Receiving Centre in St. John's Wood.

While at St. John's Wood, Hinde received word that his brother, John, had been torpedoed off the coast of Africa.

Hinde would remain in the RAF for 6 years, rising to the rank of Flight Lieutenant before being given an early release in 1946 for a special exhibition at St John's College, Cambridge.

Throughout his life, Hinde was a staunch defender of peace.

During his military service, Hinde viewed war as an unfortunate necessity.

However, after the end of World War II, Hinde slowly concluded that the "preciousness of peace" was far more important than wartime victory.

Through the rest of his life and his career, Hinde was active in a number of war-avoidant groups, including the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs; the group sought to avoid violent conflict by working behind-the-scenes to provide policymakers with relevant accurate scientific information.

Specifically, Hinde emphasized the need to distinguish various levels of aggression, from individual conflict to group conflict to world war.

Upon leaving the RAF in 1946, Hinde enrolled as an undergraduate at St. John's College, and read chemistry, physiology, and zoology.

He received a first in Part II zoology in 1948.

While at St. John's, Hinde also served as the secretary for the Cambridge Bird Club; with the help of the British Trust for Ornithology, Hinde was able to publish several papers on the behavior of several species of birds during this time.

One such paper, in which he carefully recorded species of tits opening milk jugs left outside, remains a seminal work in social learning.

Hinde would later describe interactions with a young David Attenborough in which they would help each other with dissections.

In his last year at St. John's, Hinde also met his first wife, Hester, with whom he would have 4 children.

In 1948, Hinde accepted a position at Balliol College, Oxford, studying under David Lack.

Although Lack had envisioned Hinde's research to focus on the feeding ecology of jackdaws and rooks, Hinde convinced him to change the research program to pursue study of the great tit.

While Lack was Hinde's official supervisor, and "was enormously helpful in teaching [Hinde] to be critical and describe selectively and write concisely", Hinde credited the most major influence on his later work to Niko Tinbergen, who arrived at Oxford in 1950.

Tinbergen was on the cusp of becoming a seminal figure in the field of ethology and behavior with his "four ‘why’s’ of behavior", and this allowed Hinde to learn the ethological methods early on and apply them to the rest of his career.

Hinde received a D.Phil in 1950; his thesis focused on the annual cycle and behavior of the great tit, and on comparing it to other members of the family Paridae.

The thesis marked the first systematic observation and description of the annual behavior of the species.

After receiving his D.Phil., Hinde accepted a position from W.H. Thorpe that involved being the curator of a field station location in the village of Madingley.

Although the position included a condition that Hinde was not to carry out his own independent research, both Thorpe and Hinde ignored this stipulation.

Hinde carried out a variety of research projects in avian species, in the areas of comparative ethology, imprinting, motivation and habituation, and canary nest-building behavior.

The nest-building study was particularly interesting, with its interdisciplinary approach that incorporated not only ethological methods, but endocrinological ones as well, by incorporating a study of hormonal influence on nest-building.

During his time at Madingley, Hinde developed a collaborative friendship with renowned developmental psychologist John Bowlby.

Bowlby was intrigued by the concept of using strict ethological approaches in his observations of children; to that point, developmental psychology had been heavily focused on psychoanalysis and learning theories of mother-infant attachment.

Bowlby, through Hinde's ethological influence, developed a socio-emotive attachment theory for which he would later become known.

The introduction of strict, objective observational data collection would become a staple of developmental psychology methods.

On Hinde's side, the friendship with Bowlby introduced him to psychological theories and ideas about the influence that relationships among individuals can have on observed behavior.

Hinde, at Bowlby's invitation, attended a recurring seminar that included psychologists of various fields, exposing him to many ideas of learning theory and analysis.