Geoffrey Beattie


Geoffrey Beattie FBPsS FRSM FRSA is a psychologist, author and broadcaster. He is Professor of Psychology at Edge Hill University and has been visiting Professor at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California Santa Barbara. He graduated with a First Class Honours degree from the University of Birmingham and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Books

He has published twenty-five books on a wide range of topics including the psychology of language and communication, nonverbal communication/body language, the psychology of sustainability and climate change, implicit ethnic bias, prejudice and conflict,
applying psychological techniques to everyday life, the psychology of sport, boxing and running, ethnographic studies of working-class life in the U.K.and a memoir 'Protestant Boy' published by Granta in 2004, amongst others.
‘We are the People’ was for the Ewart-Biggs Literary Prize. ‘On the Ropes’ was shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award. ‘The Psychology of Language and Communication’ was republished in the Routledge Classic Editions series, thirty years after it first appeared. ‘Survivors of Steel City’ formed the basis for the documentary film ‘Tales from a Hard City’ which won the Grand Prix at the Marseilles Film Festival and the Best Regional Film in the Indies Award. Beattie was credited as story consultant on the film.
Beattie has also published two novels – ‘The Corner Boys’ and ‘The Body’s Little Secrets’. ‘The Corner Boys’, the story of a teenager growing up in a loyalist working-class neighbourhood of Belfast during the Troubles, was also shortlisted for the Ewart-Biggs Literary Prize.
‘The Body’s Little Secrets’ was the story of a social psychologist, Matt, whose research centres on the analysis of nonverbal communication. The novel situates the action in Sheffield in Thatcher’s Britain of the early nineteen-eighties, just after the miners’ strike with the mines and the steelworks closing. Matt is trying to make a name for himself as an academic in this changing societal landscape. He is called upon to analyse the CCTV footage of a murder in a nightclub which shows the nonverbal actions of the protagonists, but there is no sound on the tape. So, despite his theoretical understanding that gesture necessarily works with speech, he is asked to make pronouncements on the meaning of the nonverbal action in the videotape without knowing the words in order to further his career.
In a review in the international journal Semiotica, Professor Marcel Danesi, Professor of Semiotics and Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Toronto, described the book as a ‘truly outstanding work’ and wrote that ‘With his latest novel, Dr Geoffrey Beattie can now be projected onto the same international platform as the late Umberto Eco, who became famous for integrating semiotic theory with fiction, starting with his bestseller, The Name of the Rose...There is little doubt, in my estimation at least, that Geoffrey Beattie is Eco’s successor, displaying an uncanny and ingenious ability to blend his insightful work on nonverbal semiotics with an exceptional sense for narrative in this outstanding roman-à-clef.’
Danesi added ‘In sum, I will say again that Beattie is Eco’s successor. This is not an exaggerated claim. In my view it is a verifiable fact – all one has to do is read the two authors to glean similarities and analogies between them. If I were to teach a course on nonverbal semiotics, I would even use Beattie’s novel as a textbook, given that it would enthral students with its powerful plot, at the same time introducing them to the intellectual importance of decoding the body’s little secrets.’ A review by Brian Maye in the Irish Times described the novel as ‘compelling and well-observed.... incisive and compelling and full of psychological insight.’

Research

Beattie’s research falls within the broad areas of embodied cognition/multi-modal communication and applied social psychology particularly in the areas of sustainability and race where he researches the relationship between explicit and implicit processes, and the societal implications of any possible ‘dissociation’ here.

Multi-modal Communication

His long-standing interest in multi-modal communication offers a major reconceptualization of nonverbal communication and the interaction between language and nonverbal communication in talk. He has explored the cognitive, social and pragmatic functions of the iconic gestures that accompany speech, including the role of iconic gesture in lexical retrieval and how gestures and speech complement each other in intricate ways in semantic communication. He was awarded the Spearman Medal by the British Psychological Society for ‘published psychological research of outstanding merit’ for some of his work in this area. His research shows that both verbal and nonverbal elements are critical to everyday semantic communication and that iconic gestures reflect unarticulated aspects of thinking. This has implications for how we think about speech and human communication. He has researched how listeners decode iconic gestures and how, and why, certain gestures attract the gaze fixations of listeners and the implications of this for communicative effectiveness. He has explored the possible applications of this theoretical perspective for advertising and for deception, where gesture-speech mismatches may occur, along with structural changes in the phases of gestures. This research won the international Mouton d’Or prize for the best research paper in semiotics. He has also considered the implications of this close connection between speech and bodily movement for the organisation of conversations themselves and particularly for turn taking in conversation.

Sustainability

Another strand of his research is into the psychological barriers that prevent consumers adopting more sustainable lifestyles in the light of the threat posed by climate change. He has challenged the established orthodoxy in this field. DEFRA, and others, have argued that the promotion of more sustainable behaviour is essentially just an ‘informational’ issue because the public already have the right underlying attitudes to environmental issues like carbon footprint. For this reason, carbon labels were introduced. Beattie’s experimental research, using eye tracking, showed that there was minimal visual attention to carbon labels and that explicit self-reported attitudes to carbon footprint did not actually predict visual attention to climate change images. Measures of implicit attitude, where such attitudes are largely unconscious and measured through speed of association, were, however, better predictors of both attentional focus and behavioural choice under certain conditions. Dispositional optimism also seems to affect visual attention to climate change images and this links to optimism bias. He has explored new segmentation analyses of consumer markets based upon the intersection of explicit and implicit attitudes and researching how to change both types of attitude, necessary to produce the radical shift in consumer behaviour required to combat climate change.
Beattie presented this research on sustainability at the United Nations Conference on Climate Change at UNESCO headquarters in Paris in July 2015, and with Laura McGuire contributed a chapter to the United Nations International Commission on Education for Sustainable-Development-Practice Report, to be published in 2019.

Implicit Racial Bias

Another strand of his current research is into implicit racial bias and its effects on everyday life. He has explored how implicit racial attitudes impact on shortlisting decisions. He has shown how gaze fixations, as we consider CVs, are influenced by our implicit attitudes, and he has investigated how these impact on the representations that we build up of the various candidates under consideration, thereby influencing our final ‘rational’ decision about the relative suitability of the candidates. He has researched how people justify and rationalise their everyday decisions that often result from processes that are more implicit. Using the terminology of the Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, he has explored how System 1 and System 2 interact in everyday life and the implications of this interaction for both behaviour and talk. He has given a number of significant keynote addresses on this theme at a variety of applied conferences, including the Annual Conference of the Staffordshire Fire and Rescue Service, the , the , the Respect Difference Conference, Police Service of Northern Ireland etc.
The overarching focus of his research has been on how human beings communicate and make decisions in their everyday social worlds, with emphasis on the more unconscious and implicit aspects of these everyday processes. He has been interested, throughout his career, in the real-world relevance of his research.

Outreach

Beattie was President of the Psychology Section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 2005-6 and has given many keynote addresses to a range of audience, including public lectures at , the , the , the , , both Houses of Parliament through the , the etc. He has also spoken at various music and book festivals including ‘’, ‘’, Latitude and the , and
He is also well known for bringing analyses of behaviour, and particularly nonverbal communication, to a more general audience by appearing as the on-screen psychologist on eleven series of Big Brother in the U.K. and for explaining how psychology can be used by people in their everyday lives. His work in psychology has been extensively covered in the national and international media.
Beattie was an external consultant on the with Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever, and others. LV is a major global initiative that seeks to identify, support and mobilise future-fit leaders – all in the interest of reinventing growth. Inspired by CEOs such as Paul Polman and Ajay Banga, and instigated by Xyntéo and DNV GL, the Vanguard partnership includes Unilever, MasterCard, Woodside, Singapore’s Economic Development Board, Ericsson, Energias de Portugal and the International Committee of the Red Cross. This organisation helps shape the sustainability policy of Unilever and other leading multinationals.

Academic appointments

2013- Professor of Psychology, Edge Hill University.
2013- Masters Supervisor, Sustainability Leadership Programme, University of Cambridge.
2012-2013- Visiting Professor, Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara.
2004-2011- Head of School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Manchester.
2004-2012- Research Group Leader, Language and Communication Research Group, School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester.
2008-2012- Professorial Research Fellow, Sustainable Consumption Institute, University of Manchester.
2004-2011- Member of the Senior Management Board for the Faculty of Medical and Human Sciences, University of Manchester.
2000-2004- Member of the Senior Executive, Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Manchester.
2000-2004- Head of Department of Psychology, University of Manchester.
1994-2012- Professor of Psychology at the University of Manchester. His departure in 2012 led to Employment Tribunal proceedings. . The University made a financial settlement to Professor Beattie in respect of Employment Tribunal case number 2401282/2013.
1991-1994- Reader in Social Psychology, University of Sheffield
1988-1991- Senior Lecturer in Social Psychology, University of Sheffield
1981-1984- Visiting lecturer, Department of Linguistics, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
1977-1988- Lecturer in Social Psychology, University of Sheffield

Media

Television

Resident on-screen psychologist 2000-2010 focussing mainly on nonverbal communication and patterns of social interaction
Co-presenter, Life’s Too Short
This series applied psychological insights to a range of people having trouble in their relationships.
Presenter, Family SOS
A detailed look at families currently experiencing a wide range of important but unidentified psychological issues. The analytic focus was again on the behaviour of the family members and how they interacted with each other. The goal was to work out what specifically needed to change to improve the situation.
Presenter, Dump Your Mates in Four Days
A series aimed at teenagers which allowed teenagers to ‘try out’ different sets of friends in order to teach them something about themselves and their social networks and how things can change.
Co-presenter and psychologist, The Farm of Fussy Eaters
A series focusing on individuals with oddly constrained and unhealthy food choices. His role was to understand where the various attitudes to food came from and how they could be modified.
On-screen psychologist, Ghosthunting with....
On-screen psychologist, focusing on the nonverbal behaviour of celebrities in various ‘haunted’ locations. The celebrities have included Girls Aloud, Coronation Street, Emmerdale, McFly, The Happy Mondays, Paul O’Grady and friends, Boyzone, The Saturdays, Katie Price and friends, TOWIE etc.
He has also been a frequent guest on the ITV News, Lorraine Kelly, Richard and Judy, The One Show, Tonight with Trevor McDonald, with other guest appearances on Child of Our Time, Arena, It’s Only a Theory, Risky Business, Tomorrow’s World, The Heart of the Matter, Watchdog, BBC Breakfast, Good Morning America, the Keri-Anne Show, TV4, News Asia, The Mindfield, and various documentaries for Channel 4, Channel 5, BBC4 and Sky.

Journalism

He has written extensively for The Guardian, The Observer, The Observer Magazine, The Independent and The Independent on Sunday.

Published work

Books

Nonverbal Communication