Geoffrey Beattie

Biography

Geoffrey Beattie is Professor of Psychology at Edge Hill University, UK. Previously, he was Professor of Psychology at the University of Manchester, UK, as well as a Professorial Research Fellow at the university’s Sustainable Consumption Institute. He has also been Visiting Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. He received his PhD from Trinity College, University of Cambridge, UK, and is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society (BPS), a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He has also been President of the Psychology Section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He has published over 100 articles in academic journals, including Nature and Nature Climate Change and was awarded the Spearman Medal by the BPS for “published psychological research of outstanding merit”, and the Mouton d’Or for the best research paper in semiotics.

He is the author of twenty six books with various Chinese, Taiwanese, Brazilian, Italian, Finnish and German editions. We Are the People: Journeys Through the Heart of Protestant Ulster (Heinemann) and The Corner Boys (Victor Gollancz) were both shortlisted for the Ewart-Biggs Literary Prize; On the Ropes: Boxing as a Way of Life (Victor Gollancz) was shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year; Trophy Hunting: A Psychological Perspective (Routledge) was shortlisted for a Taylor & Francis Outstanding Book and Digital Product Award in the Outstanding Professional Category in 2019.

He has presented a number of television programmes in the UK on BBC1’s Life’s Too Short and Family SOS’, Channel 4’s Dump Your Mates in Four Days, and UKTV’s The Farm of Fussy Eaters. He was also the resident on-screen psychologist for Big Brother for eleven series on Channel 4 in the UK specialising in body language and social behaviour. His latest book Selfless: A Psychologist’s Journey through Identity and Social Class (Routledge) was reviewed by Professor Marcel Danesi from the University of Toronto, Canada who wrote: “What is the Self? How is it related to consciousness? This dilemma has entertained some of the greatest minds of human history. This book contributes in a significant way to that history, written by one of today’s great thinkers, Geoffrey Beattie. In this unique book, Beattie brings us into his own world of Self-construction. We thus come away understanding what psychology should really be....It is required reading by anyone interested in understanding what consciousness is and how it emerges throughout the life cycle.”