William Ickes

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William Ickes is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas at Arlington. He is a personality and social psychologist who is known primarily for his research on unstructured dyadic interaction. His first major line of research within this tradition concerns the phenomenon of empathic accuracy ("everyday mind reading"). This research is summarized in his 2003 book Everyday Mind Reading: Understanding What Other People Think and Feel. His second major line of research concerns the influence of personal traits and characteristics on people's initial interactions with each other. This research is summarized in his 2009 book Strangers in a Strange Lab: How Personality Shapes Our Initial Encounters with Others.

Background

Ickes received his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology in 1973 at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was trained in the social psychology program. His primary research advisor was Robert Wicklund, although Elliot Aronson was also an important professional mentor during this time. Ickes's first academic job was at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he initiated the research on unstructured dyadic interaction that he would continue to do throughout his academic career. After leaving Wisconsin, he taught briefly at the University of Missouri-St. Louis (1979–1982). He returned to Texas in 1982 to begin his employment at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he has been for nearly 30 years. He was a Visiting Professor at the University of Washington in 1992; a Visiting Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1999; and an International Francqui Chair at Ghent University and the Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, in 2005.

He married Mary Jo Renard in 1967 and they had three sons: Marcus, John, and William (who died at the age of 13).

Empathic accuracy (everyday mind reading)

Both alone and in collaboration with various colleagues, Ickes has published widely on the topic of empathic accuracy. The study of empathic accuracy has become an important subfield of two larger fields of study--(1) research on empathy and (2) research on interpersonal perception. Much of the available research on this topic is summarized in two books: Empathic Accuracy (1997) and Everyday Mind Reading (2003).

Ickes's books and articles on empathic accuracy currently comprise about 60 publications. His research has addressed the questions of whether women have greater empathic accuracy than men, whether friends have greater empathic accuracy than strangers, and whether abusive husbands display an impaired ability to "read" their wives' thoughts and feelings. It has also examined the informational sources of empathic accuracy, its motivational aspects, and its role in social support interactions. His empathic accuracy model, written in collaboration with Jeffry Simpson, is perhaps the most influential theory in this area of research.

Personality influences on strangers' interactions

Using the unstructured dyadic interaction paradigm, Ickes and his colleagues have explored the influences of many personal characteristics and personality traits on the interactions between strangers. More specifically, they have examined the influences of such personal characteristics as the participants' gender, their birth order, their race/ethnicity, and their physical attractiveness. They have also examined the effects of various personality traits such as androgyny, the Big Five personality traits, shyness, and self-monitoring. This research is summarized in Strangers in a Strange Lab (2009).

Other contributions

In addition to his work on empathic accuracy, Ickes has made a broader contribution to the study of intersubjective social cognition.[1] His 1994 article with Richard Gonzalez was the first to draw a strong distinction between subjective social cognition, which occurs entirely in one person's head and concerns either imagined, reflected-upon, or anticipated interaction, and intersubjective social cognition, which occurs during an actual, ongoing social interaction and involves the intersubjective experience of the interaction partners. Subsequent papers have elaborated this distinction, which owes much to the existentialist influence of writers such as Alfred Schütz and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Similarly, Ickes's development of a method for measuring empathic accuracy is only part of his broader contribution to developing methods for the study of naturalistic social cognition. These methods enable the assessment and content analysis of the actual thoughts and feelings that interaction partners report, and permit an exploration of the intersubjective themes that characterize the interactions of different dyad types.

Ickes's interest in personality is also evident in the various personality measures that he and his colleagues have developed. These measures assess the constructs of adherence to conventional morality, internal-external correspondence, self-motivation, social absorption and social individuation, and strength of sense of self. More recently, he and his colleagues have developed other measures to assess the constructs of ego-defensiveness, affect intensity for anger and frustration, and rudeness.

In collaboration with William Schweinle and other colleagues, William Ickes participated in an extensive study of the psychology of maritally aggressive men. Over the course of four studies, Schweinle, Ickes, and their colleagues found that maritally aggressive men are especially inaccurate when inferring their own wives' thoughts and feelings, and that a major source of this deficit is their biased belief that women harbor critical and rejecting thoughts and feelings about their male partners. This biased perception of women as being critical and rejecting appears to help justify the men's marital aggression in their own minds, and it is a bias that they seek to preserve through tactics such as disattending a women's complaints and reacting to such communications with feelings of contempt rather than sympathy. In general, maritally aggressive men appear to be angry, egocentric individuals. For some of these men, marital abuse is the product of a sudden impulse; for others, it is the product of a built-up resentment that has its origin in the biased perception that women harbor critical and rejecting thoughts and feelings about their male partners. These findings have clearcut implications for the treatment of abusive behavior in maritally aggressive men.

Finally, Ickes developed a theory of how people's sex roles (gender roles) affect their behavior and experience in initial interactions. The impact of this theory has so far been quite limited, however, perhaps because it did not receive much attention when the original version of the theory was published in 1981.

Ickes has, to date, about 160 publications, which include books, books chapters, journal articles, commentaries, and reviews. Along with John H. Harvey and Robert F. Kidd, he was a co-editor of the three-volume series New Directions in Attribution Research.

Academic honors and awards

In 1997, Ickes received the Berscheid/Hatfield Award for Distinguished Mid-Career Achievement from the International Network on Personal Relationships and a Certificate of Commendation from the American Psychological Foundation. In 1998, he became a Fellow of the American Psychological Society and was a co-recipient (with Jeffry A. Simpson and Tami Blackstone) of a New Contribution Award from the International Society for the Study of Personal Relationships. In 2002, he became a Fellow of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology and received the Distinguished Record of Research Award from the University of Texas at Arlington. In 2005, he was recognized as an International Francqui Chair by Belgium's Francqui Foundation and was inducted into the University of Texas at Arlington's Academy of Distinguished Scholars.

Editorial experience

Ickes served as a Topic Editor for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology from 1978–1979; as Associate Editor for the Review of Personality and Social Psychology from 1983–1986; and as Associate Editor for the Journal of Research in Personality from 2004-2006. He has also served as a Consulting Editor for Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin(1980–1981), the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior (1988–1992, 1994–1996, and the Review of Personality and Social Psychology (2004–2006). He was a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology from 1982-1991.

Books

Ickes has published two single-authored books:

• Everyday Mind Reading: Understanding What Other People Think and Feel (2003)
• Strangers in a Strange Lab: How Personality Shapes Our Initial Encounters with Others (2009)

He has also published several edited (or co-edited) books:

• Harvey, J., Ickes, W., & Kidd, R. (Eds.) (1976). New directions in attribution research. Vol. 1. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
• Harvey, J., Ickes, W., & Kidd, R. (Eds.) (1978). New directions in attribution research. Vol. 2. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
• Harvey, J., Ickes, W., & Kidd, R. (Eds.) (1981). New directions in attribution research. Vol. 3. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
• Ickes, W., & Knowles, E.S. (Eds.) (1982). Personality, roles, and social behavior. New York: Springer-Verlag.
• Ickes, W. (Ed.) (1985). Compatible and incompatible relationships. New York: Springer-Verlag.
• Duck, S.W., Hay, D.F., Hobfoll, S.E., Ickes, W., & Montgomery, B., (Eds.), (1988). Handbook of personal relationships: Theory, research, and interventions (1st ed.). Chichester, UK: Wiley.
• Duck, S.W., Dindia, K., Ickes, W., Milardo, R.M., Mills, R., & Sarason, B. (Eds.) (1997). Handbook of personal relationships: Theory, research, and interventions (2nd ed.). Chichester, UK: Wiley.
• Ickes, W. (Ed.) (1997). Empathic accuracy. New York: Guilford Press.
• Decety, J., & Ickes, W. (Eds.) (2009). The social neuroscience of empathy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Smith, J.L., Ickes, W., Hall, J., & Hodges, S.D. (Eds.). (2011). Managing interpersonal sensitivity: Knowing when—and when not—to understand others. New York: Nova Science.