William Ickes

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 over 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)

Ickes has published widely on the topic of empathic accuracy, both alone and in collaboration with various colleagues. The study of empathic accuracy has become an important subfield at the interface of two larger fields of study--(1) research on empathy and (2) research on accuracy in 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 mind 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 in applying innovative methods to the study of naturalistic social cognition. Some of these methods enable the assessment and content analysis of the actual thoughts and feelings that interaction partners report, and they also permit an exploration of the intersubjective themes that characterize the interactions of different dyad types. In addition, by comparing the linguistic content of people's self-reported thoughts with the linguistic content of their self-reported feelings, Ickes and Cheng (2011) were able to delineate several ways in which thoughts differ from feelings. In more recent research, Ickes and his colleagues have studied how latent semantic similarity (LSS) develops in dyadic interactions.

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 thin-skinned ego-defensiveness, affect intensity for anger and frustration, and rudeness. They have also published psychometric articles on (a) the pitfalls of using item variance as a measure of "traitedness" and (b) the reduction in internal consistency that results from inter-item "context switching."

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, perhaps because it did not receive much attention when the original version of the theory was published in 1981. Ironically, however, a spin-off article titled "Traditional Gender Roles: Do They Make, and then Break, our Relationships?" has been read and/or downloaded more than 9000 times from the ResearchGate website.

Ickes has, to date, written or co-authored more than 180 publications, which include books, book 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. In 2012, his book Strangers in a Strange Lab received the International Association of Relationship Researchers Book Award.

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:

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