Jonathan H. Morgan

.jonathan

319 Information Sciences and Technology Building
The College of Information Sciences and Technology
The Pennsylvania State University
University Park, PA 16802
jhm5001@psu.edu

 

Background                                                                                                                                  

2008-Present:  Research Assistant and Project Facilitator, ACS Lab

2004-2007:  Undergraduate Student, The Pennsylvania State University

1998-2003:  Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Operator, US Army

Education

B.A. in Political Science and B.A. in Philosophy (graduated with highest distinction and honors)

U.S. Army Primary Leadership Development Course (graduated on the Commandant's List)

Interests

I am interested in developing tools and theories that deepen our understanding of conflict.  Borrowing from work done by Stanley Milgram, Phillip Zimbardo, David Grossman, and Allen Newell, I posited in my honors thesis that conflict is a rule bound activity constrained by predictable psychological influences.  I then explored how these influences shape the development and operation of enlisted work cultures, which in turn mediate the responses of soldiers and veterans to trauma.     

Joining the Applied Cognitive Science (ACS) lab in 2008, I have worked to move my thesis’s descriptive account to a predictive one by modeling small group activity using agents in a simulation environment (d-Tank).  I seek through this work to better understand how conflict and its legacies inform future political activity, particularly the role played by sub-state actors (e.g. militias, women’s movements, and terrorist organizations) in fragile or non-state environments.             

Publications and Presentations

Morgan, J. H. (2007). Nietzsche, war, and social memory: A reflection on trauma and the enlisted experience. Unpublished Honors thesis, Penn State, University Park, PA.

Morgan, J. H., Morgan, G. P., Ritter, F. E., & Poncelin de Raucourt, V. P. M. (2009). A preliminary model of participation. In Proceeding of the 18th Conference on Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation, 129-136.  SISO, Inc.: Sundance Ranch, UT.

Morgan, J. H., Cheng, C. Y., Pike, C., & Ritter, F. E. (2009). A design and tests for improving keystroke and mouse loggers. Behavior Research Methods, Submitted.

Morgan, J. H., Morgan, G. P., Ritter, F. E., and Yen, J. (2009). A model of participation. In Proceedings of the First International Human, Social, Cultural, Behavioral Sciences and Modeling (HSCB) Workshop, ONR Global:  Istanbul, Turkey.