Robert Aubrey Hinde CBE FRS FBA /haɪnd/ (26 October 1923 – 23 December 2016) was a British zoologist, ethologist and psychologist.
[4] 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.
[4] 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.
[6] One such paper, in which he carefully recorded species of tits opening milk jugs left outside, remains a seminal work in social learning.
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.
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.
[4] 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.
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.
[4] The two agreed that monkey mothers and their offspring would be an acceptable analogue for human mother-infant interactions, and would allow for experimental work to be conducted.
[citation needed] Hinde's experience working with primates at Madingley led to him being heavily involved in the founding of several field sites for the study of great apes in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s.
[4] For example, Leakey wanted to get formal scientific training for Jane Goodall, who had been working at the site for some years but lacked a bachelor's degree.
Hinde would collaborate with and train other primatologists working in a variety of species, including Anne Pusey, Richard Wrangham, Sandy Harcourt, Kelly Stewart, Robert Seyfarth, and Dorothy Cheney, among many others.
[4] Hinde's supervising emphasized the objective ethological data collection methods that he had popularized in the field through his work with the rhesus macaques at Madingley.
During the 1970s and 1980s, Hinde was also involved in studies of human-mother interaction; he had developed a "dialectical" framework of attachment using a blend of ethology's objective observation and Bowlby's focus on relationship quality.