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. 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 (measured using various self-report instruments). 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 presented this research at the British Academy Summer Showcase in 2018 where the best research funded by the B.A. is highlighted). 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 (a report issued every ten years by the U.N. to define priorities in education internationally for the next decade), to be published in 2019.