[1] 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.
While in Canada, Vernon participated in winter sports and was a board member of the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra.
Vernon worked with Gordon Allport to investigate expressive movement and to develop the Allport-Vernon Study of Values.
Vernon assessed hypotheses about cultural and genetic influences on educational, professional, and economic achievements of Japanese and Chinese immigrants to North America.
[1] 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 per cent of the variance in human intellectual ability is attributable to genetic factors, and that there is some evidence implicating genes in racial group differences in average levels of mental ability.
[2] He received a grant from Pioneer Fund in 1982,[4] which he used to document the substantial social class differences in IQ scores found in both the US and the UK.
The basic unit of analysis in this metaphor is that there are factors that are the sources of individual differences in intelligence among people.