Hilde Himmelweit

Hilde Himmelweit (1918 to 1989) was a German-born social psychologist who had a major influence on the development of her discipline in Britain. Born in Berlin as Hildegard Litthauer, she studied at Newnham College, Cambridge, and took her doctorate under Hans Eysenck at the Institute of Psychiatry. She taught at the London School of Economics from 1948 to 1983 and from 1964 was Britain's first Professor of Social Psychology, founding the school's social psychology department. As director of the Nuffield Foundation television inquiry from 1954 to 1958 she wrote Television and the Child, and in political psychology she led a fifteen year study of young voters published as How Voters Decide. She also argued for a societal psychology and helped develop the theory of social representations.