Philip E. Vernon: Difference between revisions

{{Infobox personscientist

| name = Philip Ewart Vernon

'''Philip Ewart Vernon''' (6 June 1905 – 28 July 1987) was a British-born Canadian psychologist and author. He studied intellectual ability with a focus on [[race and intelligence]].

Philip Vernon was born in [[Oxford, England]] on 6 June 1905.<ref name="jackson">Jackson, Douglas N. Philip E. Vernon: 1905–1987. ''[[Canadian Psychology]]''/Psychologie canadienne, Vol 30(4), Oct. 1989, 699.</ref> His father was H. M. Vernon who was a lecturer in physiology at the [[University of Oxford]], and was Great Britain's foremost figure in industrial psychology. His mother [[Dorothea Ewart]] was author of several works on Italian history. Philip worked with his wife, Dorothy, in the study of gifted children. They had one son, [[Philip Anthony Vernon]], who also researched intellectual abilities.<ref name="jackson"/> When Vernon joined the University of Calgary, he became a Canadian citizen. While in Canada, Vernon participated in winter sports and was a board member of the [[Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra]].<ref name="jackson"/> Vernon died of cancer in 1987. After his passing, the [[University of Calgary]] started giving an award for higher education students in his name for social sciences, educational psychology, humanities, or fine arts: music and genetics.<ref name="jackson"/>

Vernon studied classics and natural sciences at [[Cambridge University]] before he studied psychology with [[F. C. Bartlett]]. In 1927, he graduated with a B.A. with first class honorshonours in physics, physiology, psychology and chemistry. He received his M.A. in 1930 from [[St John's College, Cambridge|St. John's College]] and his Ph.DPhD in 1931 from Cambridge University. His dissertation focused on the psychology of musical appreciation and auditory perception. He had multiple different careers during the 1930s and 1940s, as well as completing multiple postdoctoral fellowships at Yale and Harvard before going to the [[University of London]] to finish his [[DSc]] in 1952. Vernon worked as a professor at multiple different universities once he finished his DSc. After London, Vernon went to the [[University of Calgary]] and was made an honorary doctor of laws in 1978.<ref name=theory>{{cite web|last1=Plucker|first1=J|title=Philip E. Vernon|url=http://www.intelltheory.com/vernon.shtml|website=intelltheory.com|accessdate= 16 NovNovember 2014}}</ref>

*Rockefeller fellowship allowed him to travel to the United States to gain knowledge on the measurement of personality.<ref name=vernonlife>{{cite book|last1=Trahair|first1=R.C.S.|title=From Aristotelian to Reaganomics: A Dictionary of Eponyms with Biographies in the Social Sciences|date=1994|publisher=Greenwood Publishing Group|location=Westport, CT|page=9|accessdate=}}</ref>

*Psychological research advisor to the admiralty and war office creating training methods and selection tests during World War II.<ref name=vernonlife/>

*Professor of educational psychology at the University of London Institute of Education from 1949–19681949 to 1968.<ref name=vernonlife/>

Vernon worked with [[Gordon Allport]] to investigate expressive movement and to develop the Allport-Vernon Study of Values. Throughout his career, Vernon addressed the topics of heredity and environment and racial differences in intelligence. Vernon assessed hypotheses about cultural and genetic influences on educational, professional, and economic achievements of Japanese and Chinese immigrants to North America.<ref name="jackson"/> In studying the relationship between heredity and environment, Vernon recognized the role of environmental factors, but his research led him to determine that approximately sixty percentper cent of the variance in human intellectual ability is attributable to [[Heritability of IQ|genetic factor]]s, and that there is some evidence implicating genes in racial group differences in average levels of mental ability.<ref name=theory/>

He received a grant from [[Pioneer Fund]] in 1982,<ref name=fund>{{cite web|title=Controversies: Setting the record straight |url=http://www.pioneerfund.org/Controversies.html |website=Pioneer Fund, Inc. |accessdate=16 November 2014 |deadurlurl-status=yesdead |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20130215204456/http://www.pioneerfund.org/Controversies.html |archivedate=15 February 2013 }}</ref> which he used to document the substantial social class differences in [[IQ]] scores found in both the US and the UK. According to the Pioneer Fund website,

<{{blockquote>|the analysis of the World War I American military conscripts showed that the average IQ of children born in the professional class was 123, whereas those born to unskilled workers averaged 96. Vernon concluded that these social class differences have some genetic basis. He based this assessment on his review of the evidence that the intelligence of adopted children related more to the social class of their biological parents than to that of their adopting parents. Vernon suggested that social mobility allows those with higher intelligence to rise in the social hierarchy, while those with lower intelligence tend to fall.</blockquote>}}

In 1968, at the age of 63, he abandoned a secure academic career in England to start a second career at the [[University of Calgary]]. The Philip E. Vernon Award at University of Calgary is named in his honorhonour.

==Major Contributionscontributions==

Vernon preferred factor analysis for research and applied this approach to intelligence. At the top of his hierarchical model was [[Spearman]]'s ''g'' and then there were two major group factors; verbal-educational ability (''v:ed'') and practical-spatial-mechanical abilities (''k:m'') which could always be decomposed into smaller factors. The factors at the top were more general abilities that affected a wide range of intelligent behaviors while those factors at the bottom involved specific skills for an act.<ref name=clinical>{{cite book|last1=Gross|first1=A|last2=Hersen|first2=M|title=Handbook of clinical psychology|date=2008|publisher=John Wily & Sons, Inc|location=New Jersey|accessdate=}}</ref> Vernon extended [[intelligence]] theory by adding the importance of the test which he called Intelligence C.<ref name=theory/>

Author of 14 books and approximately 200 journal articles:<ref name=theory/>

[[Category:20th-century British psychologists]]

[[Category:RacePeople involved in race and intelligence controversycontroversies]]

[[Category:Academic staff of the University of Calgary faculty]]