Joseph Gaither Pratt
| Joseph Gaither Pratt | |
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| Born | August 31, 1910 |
| Died | November 3, 1979 (aged 69) |
| Occupation | Psychologist, parapsychologist |
Joseph Gaither Pratt (August 31, 1910 – November 3, 1979) was an American psychologist who specialized in the field of parapsychology. Among his research interests were extrasensory perception, psychokinesis, mediumship and poltergeists.
Much of Pratt's research was conducted while he was associated with J. B. Rhine's Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University (1932-1964), and he also conducted research while associated with Columbia University (1935-1937), under Gardner Murphy, and the University of Virginia (1964-1975). 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 (1940). 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.
J. G. Pratt was born on August 31, 1910, at Winston-Salem in the Piedmont section of North Carolina, the fourth among 10 children of a large farming family. From an early age, he planned to become a Methodist minister. He commenced his university studies in 1928 at Trinity College, Durham, in what was to become Duke University's School of Religion, and from which he obtained his B.A. in 1931. Pratt came to realize that "my mind was not suited to a profession in which the answers to the great questions regarding man and his relation to the universe are largely taken on faith". Accordingly, in 1932, he entered Duke's Department of Psychology, from which he graduated with a M.A. in 1933, and a Ph.D. in 1936. His doctoral thesis was concerned with the psychology of learning, as informed by his experiments on white rats.
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