HIMMELWEIT, HILDEGARD

HIMMELWEIT, HILDEGARD (1918–1989), British social psychologist. Born Hildegard Litthauer in Berlin, the daughter of a chemist whose family had been prominent in German culture, Himmelweit emigrated to Britain in 1934 after her father's death and was educated at Cambridge. In the early 1940s she qualified as a clinical psychologist at London University, but gained a lasting reputation as a social psychologist and was professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics from 1964. Himmelweit became known for her studies of the effects of television, co-authoring Television and the Child (1958), and for her studies of political voting patterns and how individuals came to alter them. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: ODNB online. (William D. Rubinstein (2nd ed.)