Little Hans, clever Hans and big Hans

The “Clever Hans Phenomenon” revisited

In the first decade of the 20th century, a horse named Hans drew worldwide attention in Berlin as the first and most famous "speaking" and thinking animal. Hans solved calculations by tapping numbers or letters with his hoof in order to answer questions. Later on, it turned out that the horse was able to give the correct answer by reading the microscopic signals in the face of the questioning p...

What 'Little Hans' Started

was the case of 'Little Hans'. In 1905, Sigmund Freud described how phobias in the five-year-old boy had been treated analytically. From this starting point, a body of knowledge has been built up about disturbances in the behaviour pattern of children and adolescents and about the therapeutic methods for dealing with them in this way. Obviously, the child psychotherapist must know and understan...

Hans Arnold Heilbronn 1908-1975 Hans

Hans Meinhardt

Hans Meinhardt is a theoretical developmental biologist working at the Max-Planck-Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen. He has pioneered the use of mathematical modelling of embryonic pattern formation. He received his PhD from the University of Cologne in Physics. For a postdoctoral fellowship, he went to the European High Energy Laboratory CERN at Geneva. By collaborating in an exp...

Chair : Hans