Dr. William Ickes

Dr. William Ickes is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Arlington. He received his Ph.D. in experimental social psychology in 1973 from the University of Texas at Austin, and has held previous academic positions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Missouri-St. Louis. In 1992-93 he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Washington-Seattle. In 1999 he was a Visiting Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. In 2005 he was a Francqui International Chair at Ghent University in Ghent, Belgium. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Society and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and is a member of several other professional organizations.

Since 1974, his research has focused on the study of naturally occurring dyadic interaction. During the first 10 years of this period, Dr. Ickes and his colleagues studied how people's personality traits influence their behavior in initial, unstructured interactions. Since 1984, they have studied various aspects of naturalistic social cognition, with a primary emphasis on empathic accuracy ("everyday mind reading"). In collaboration with his colleagues, Dr. Ickes has published nearly 40 books and articles on empathic accuracy to date. His 2003 book, Everyday Mind Reading, summarizes most of the available research on this topic.

Dr. Ickes is the editor of Empathic Accuracy (1997). He is a co-editor of The Social Psychology of Personal Relationships (2000), Compatible and Incompatible Relationships (1985), and the three-volume series New Directions in Attribution Research (1976, 1978, 1981). He is a co-editor of and contributor to both editions of the Handbook of Personal Relationships (1988, 1997). He has also co-authored chapters for the Handbook of Social Psychology (1985) and the Handbook of Personality (1997). He has served as an editor of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and the Journal of Research in Psychology, and he has also served as a Consulting Editor to a number of journals in the areas of personality, social psychology, and personal relationships.

His PT blog is Everyday Mind Reading.