Johnson O'Connor

Johnson O'Connor (January 22, 1891 – July 1, 1973) was an American psychometrician, researcher, and educator. He is most remembered as a pioneer in the study of aptitude testing and as an advocate for the importance of vocabulary.

O’Connor came from a prosperous and well-rooted Chicago family. His parents were John O’Connor and Nelie Johnson O’Connor. O'Connor's mother descended from ancestors who were among the first Puritan settlers of Massachusetts, while his father was an attorney who at one time shared an office with the famous lawyer Clarence Darrow. O'Connor received a progressive primary and secondary education with John Dewey at Dewey's famous University of Chicago Laboratory School. He was graduated from Harvard University in 1913 with a degree in Philosophy. After graduation he conducted research in astronomical mathematics under famed astronomer Percival Lowell, brother of the poet Amy Lowell and worked in electrical engineering at American Steel and Wire and General Electric.

In a visionary experiment, the General Electric leadership decided that if employees could be matched to positions that best suited their natural abilities and retrained in those areas, it would benefit both company and employees. In 1922 F.P. Cox of GE asked O’Connor to develop an in-house program called the "human" engineering project that would find the proper positioning for each employee and retrain them within that field. This led O’Connor into a study of inborn aptitudes and to the development of aptitude tests that he called "work samples." Using empirical research, O'Connor developed classifications for specific human abilities, to which he gave labels such as "Graphoria," "Ideaphoria," and "Structural Visualization." O’Connor became one of the first researchers to offer documentation that aptitudes are in fact innate. For example, one who is mathematically inclined can learn much more quickly and easily about mathematics than can one whose aptitudes in this area are low. Similarly, if one were to take two groups, one that possessed a high aptitude for finger dexterity and one that did not, with practice, both groups performance would improve, but the group that possessed the higher aptitude would continue to outperform the other despite identical training.

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