Customer Reviews

Everyday Mind Reading: Understanding What Other People Think and Feel

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Bill Ickes has written a brilliant book in such a way that ordinary mortals can immediately grasp its content and never be bored.

The book explores in rich and fascinating detail human empathy. The book is written in a way that successfully blend the subtlety of observation with the rigor of experimentation and excites the reader at almost every page. It is both an outstanding scientific and literary achievement.

This book is also full of surprises. There are several important aspects related to empathic understanding that the research done by Ickes and collaborators demonstrates against our conventional wisdom.

I learned a lot reading this book. And I strongly recommend everyone interested in social cognition, human relationships, whether you are involved in academic research or simply intrigued by how and why we come to understand others to do the same.

While informative this is not a book for the light-weight or casual student of psychology. I purchased this book with the hope that it would assist me in my work as a counselor, which is has done but SLOOOWLY... there is so much to absorb, mull over, experiment with and digest.

My view may be slightly biased in that I do have mental limitations due to health challenges, but I still see a value for anyone that would elect to invest the time and effort into studying this tome.

2 stars for being misleading.
Do not buy this book if you are looking for practices and techniques for "Everyday Mind Reading." I saw the title and read the "look inside" option amazon gives you. It was extremely interesting(about the life of Richard Burton) but that's about it.
The book is good for reading about results of experiments and theories. But no everyday practice...
you have been warned.

It is full of unuseful information. Seems like if the author just wanted to fill pages with information that nobody really cares about to justify the printing of his book. This book feels like if you're reading a college work paper where the student want to impress the teacher with a very long paper but without any real conclusions. I think you can summarize this book in no more than 4 pages. One of the conclusions will be: "good friends can read their feelings/emotions better than strangers". Do you really need to read how a "scientific" experiment was done to get to that conclusion?