Geoffrey Beattie: The Psychologist For Big Brother

British psychologist Geoffrey Beattie has been studying non-verbal communication for years. In his research, he has shown us that the way we move our hands while talking is also a form of communication.

He has published numerous books and articles on the subject. He has also won many awards for his research on it. However, this is not the whole reason we know Geoffrey Beattie. He is one of the psychologists who has become well known.

Beattie was the psychologist for the TV series Big Brother in the UK. He has also put a lot of work into showing lay people how psychology can help us in our everyday lives. A good example of this is the book Get The Edge: How Simple Changes Will Transform Your Life , which has been translated into several languages.

The upbringing of Geoffrey Beattie

Geoffrey Beattie was born in Belfast. He took a degree in psychology from the University of Birmingham and received his doctorate from Trinity College Cambridge. He then became a professor of social psychology at the University of Sheffield . He showed an early interest in the link between non-verbal communication, language and thoughts.

The area he grew up in (Northern Ireland) was constantly drawn into violent confrontations and riots. This led Beattie to write several books on Ulster and the Protestant situation. He also talked about this in a number of articles he wrote for  The Guardian.

Geoffrey Beattie and his media facet

He has made several documentaries about Northern Ireland for major companies such as the BBC. Beattie has also had many appearances on the radio thanks to her interest in the relationship between sports and psychology.

However, his really big media moments came from when he participated in one of the seasons of Big Brother in the UK. However, this also caused some inconvenience. His participation as a consultant for the show caused a lot of controversy in the academic world.

His colleagues in the world of psychology accused him of giving credibility to what they consider to be gross exploitation of people for commercial purposes. Despite their criticism, however, he remained on the show.

According to Beattie , what he did was not so different from analyzing the non-verbal communication of a politician or any other person in the media. This controversy has also led people (unfairly) to consider him the Big Brother psychologist.

Multimodal communication

Geoffrey Beattie’s research work has completely re-conceptualized our understanding of non-verbal communication. It has revolutionized what we know about the link between language and non-verbal communication in a conversation. This has many implications for effective communication.

He focused a lot on lexical gestures in speech, as well as the cognitive, social and functional purposes they have. In other words , he focused on how gestures and speech work together to create an even more complex form of communication.

This is something that is especially interesting to study when a person’s lexical gestures reflect some of what they think they have not expressed in words.

He has also studied how we decode the lexical gestures of others. In addition to that, he wanted to understand why some gestures immediately attract another person’s gaze and attention.

Another interesting aspect of his research in this field is the potential way in which this theory can be used in advertising. In fact, thanks to this work, Beattie actually received the Mouton d’Or Award for Best Semiotic Research.

Geoffrey Beattie and implicit racial bias

Another fascinating thing this brilliant scientist has studied is implicit racial bias. Focusing on the most subtle, unconscious aspects of humans, he studied how implicit racial attitudes affect people’s decisions.

More specifically, it was he who studied the way people looked at him (literally) at each other. From there, he wanted to see if this reflected the idea you form about the person in front of you when they are a different race.

In recent years, Beattie has also begun to study the psychological barriers that keep people from adopting a more sustainable lifestyle. He has made some significant analyzes of consumerism and the market to understand how consumer attitudes are changing. The goal is to find out how to make people act more responsibly when it comes to climate change.

There’s no point in denying it: Geoffrey Beattie is a fascinating figure in psychology right now. You may love or hate him, but he has done much to give the public knowledge about psychology.