Joseph Gaither Pratt

Who was Joseph Gaither Pratt?

Joseph Gaither Pratt was an American psychologist who specialized in the field of parapsychology. Among his research interests were extrasensory perception, psychokinesis, mediumship, poltergeists and psi.

Much of Pratt's research was conducted while he was associated with J. B. Rhine's Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University, and he also conducted research while associated with the University of Columbia, under Gardner Murphy, and the University of Virginia. Pratt was co-experimenter in the Pearce-Pratt and Pratt-Woodruff tests that are considered by some parapsychologists to have provided evidence for psi, though critics discovered flaws in the experiments. He was the principal author of the publication Extrasensory Perception After Sixty Years. He was the principal author of an article in the journal Nature that offered a statistical summary of almost a decade of experiments with the selected participant, Pavel Stepanek.