Experimental psychology and occult skepticism

Joseph Jastrow

1863 – 1944

Joseph Jastrow was a Polish-American psychologist — the first person to earn a doctorate in psychology in the United States — who became president of the American Psychological Association in 1900 and spent his career exposing the psychological mechanisms underlying paranormal belief, illusion, and fraud. Though briefly an early member of the American Society for Psychical Research, he resigned by 1890 and became one of the foremost scientific critics of Spiritualism, telepathy, and occult claims, documenting the role of unconscious inference and self-deception in paranormal experience. His work occupies the skeptical counterpart position in the Victorian and Edwardian debate about the reality of occult phenomena.