Professor Geoff Beattie
Professor Geoff Beattie is professor of psychology at Edge Hill University with a number of books on psychology as applied to a wide range of topics (The Psychology of Language and Communication; The Psychology of Climate Change; Why Aren’t We Saving the Planet; Visible Thought; The Conflicted Mind, Trophy Hunting: A Psychological Perspective etc., all published by Routledge). He was awarded the Spearman Medal by the British Psychological Society for ‘published psychological research of outstanding merit.’ He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, the Royal Society of Medicine and the Royal Society of Arts.
He has also published several books of reportage (including Survivors of Steel City, Chatto & Windus; We are the People: Journeys Through the Heart of Protestant Ulster, Heinemann; On the Ropes: Boxing as a Way of Life, Victor Gollancz), two novels (The Corner Boys, Victor Gollancz; The Body’s Little Secrets, Gibson Square) and a memoir (Protestant Boy, Granta) - he grew up in a mill house at ‘the turn of the road’ in North Belfast (christened ‘Murder Triangle’ by the media during the Troubles) and was the first in a generation from his primary school to pass the Eleven Plus. He attended Belfast Royal Academy and did his PhD at Trinity College Cambridge. The memoir is about his Protestant working-class background and his move away from the turn-of-the-road gang. His book Selfless (Routledge, 2021) explores the discomfort of social class and education in more detail.
His most recent book is on the psychology of doubt explored through life histories. It considers self-doubt and the impostor syndrome as well as the weaponisation of doubt with respect to climate change and the marketing of cigarettes. He explores through an analysis of letters, diaries, conversations, autobiographies etc. how doubt develops and how the likes of Kafka, Jung, Picasso and Turing succumbed to doubt, or eventually learned to control it. He argues that doubt is central to the self; it can be either a safeguarding mechanism or a distraction, rational or irrational, systematic or random, healthy or pathological, productive or non-productive, but always critically important. The book Doubt: A Psychological Exploration will be published by Routledge in November 2022.
At OCLW, he will be working on a new book on lies, lying and liars. His initial research has been focussing on historical and political autobiographies and biographies, philosophical texts and the core psychological literature, including sociobiological perspectives. He has background research material on individuals who live their lives though lies - conmen, ‘ten-bob’ millionaires, undercover police, cheats and adulterers. Use of a world-class library will allow him to explore the views (and sometimes the personal experiences of lying) of Aristotle, Quintilian, St Augustine, Al-Ghazali, Thomas Aquinas, Machiavelli, Michel De Montaigne, Jean Jacques Rousseau and others.
