Professor Geoff Beattie

Professor Geoffrey Beattie is Professor of Psychology at Edge Hill University and a Masters supervisor on the Sustainability Leadership programme at the University of Cambridge. He has given numerous keynote addresses to both academic and non-academic audiences including Unilever, P&G, ITV, HSBC and Tesco and written extensively for the numerous publications including Guardian, the Observer, the Observer Magazine and The Independent.  He has presented a number of television series including ‘Life’s Too Short’ (BBC1), ‘Family SOS’ (BBC1) and ‘The Farm of Fussy Eaters’ (UKTV Style).  However he is most famous for his appearance 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.

An expert commentator on major TV networks including BBC News, ITV News and Sky News Professor Geoffrey has always been keen to show the relevance of psychology to society in general and in 2005-2006 he was President of the Psychology Section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

His research focusses primarily on embodied cognition/multi-modal communication and applied social psychology. The research on multi-modal communication offers a major reconceptualization of bodily communication, by focussing on the close connections between gestures, speech and thinking in linguistic.

His applied social psychological research focusses primarily on implicit cognition, especially implicit attitudes and their effects on behaviour, in the context of the environment (‘Why Aren’t We Saving the Planet: A Psychologist’s Perspective’, 2010) and race (‘Our Racist Heart: An Exploration of Unconscious Prejudice in Everyday Life’, 2013). In the past year, he has presented his research on why we need to target implicit, automatic associations in the fight against climate change at the United Nations Conference on Climate Change, UNESCO Headquarters, Paris, and acted as an external contributor to Unilever’s Leadership Vanguard. He has also given a number of keynote addresses on implicit racial bias at various high profile conferences throughout the U.K.

Professor Geoffrey has published 20 books on a range of topics (including one semi-autobiographical novel ‘The Corner Boys‘, Victor Gollancz, 1998) many of which have either won or been shortlisted for major national or international prizes. His books have been translated into 7 languages, he has also published over one hundred academic articles in journals including Nature, Nature Climate Change and Semiotica.

He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society (BPS) and was awarded the Spearman Medal by the BPS for ‘published psychological research of outstanding merit’ for his work on nonverbal communication. In 2010, with a number of colleagues he was awarded the internationally acclaimed Mouton d’Or for the best paper in the leading international journal Semiotica for research on the effects of deception on gesture production. He also became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine in 2016. His research has been funded from a range of sources, including research councils (ESRC; British Academy), the EU FP7, charities (Leverhulme Trust; Nuffield Foundation; Equality Challenge Unit) and from commercial sources like Tesco and Unilever.

“I have booked Professor Beattie to speak on many occasions over the past 10 years on a range of issues and subject matter. These include ‘The power and meaning of human gesture’, The broader key issues in human communication’ and ‘Human attitude to risk’.  I have also partnered with him in major broadcasters such as ITV on research projects which were both commercial relevant and useful for our audiences.  Professor Geoffrey Beattie always delivers.  He listens to the brief and creates unique presentations that are tailored to the audience, and that are powerful, inspirational, and relevant. His command of his subject is clearly outstanding – his audience is always engrossed and they emerge smarter individuals and wiser leaders.”  Founder, Cassidy Media Partnership