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.
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.
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 sought to expand his efforts in researching human aptitudes and in 1930 he founded the Human Engineering Laboratory at Stevens Institute of Technology[1] This organization evolved into the Johnson O'Connor Research Foundation, a non-profit organization with branches in several major U.S.
It was during the course of this testing that O’Connor stumbled upon an unexpected discovery: A person’s vocabulary level was the best single measure for predicting occupational success in every area.
[3] Because acquisition of vocabulary was not, in O'Connor's view, determined by innate aptitudes, it became a major focus of his later writings.
The final years of O'Connor's life were spent researching, lecturing, and writing about human aptitudes and ways for people to maximize their mental potential.