Definitions

social regulation skills: how we judge others, awareness of biases, self-control & emotion regulation, ability to take on different perspectives, and judgment that is long-term in nature and aims to balance the need to connect with the need to strive.

cognitive capital: cognitive resources such as working memory/executive attention and cognitive focus, but also the fit between people’s beliefs and reality, people’s ability to think about their thinking, and processes such as goal management.

contact us at: oybarra@umich.edu

Copyright held by Oscar Ybarra

The ability to be adaptive and behaviorally flexible is the cornerstone of intelligence, but this has to be understood in the context of two recurring challenges for people, connecting and striving. This is one of the central emphases of the lab, which is nicely captured in the following quote by Bergson (1920, pg. 33):

“Society, which is the community of individual energies, benefits from the efforts of all its members and renders effort easier to all. It can only subsist by subordinating the individual, it can only progress by leaving the individual free:  contradictory requirements, which have to be reconciled.”

In our lab we investigate basic cognitive and behavioral processes related to how people manage these contradictory requirements to produce effective behavior. These include social regulation skills and cognitive capital and their interplay.

Social Regulation skills facilitate connecting and becoming integrated, but they also enable effective social navigation to help people strive, identify needs of leadership, and innovate.

Cognitive Capital refers to the mechanics of intelligence but also the veracity of people’s beliefs for a domain (know what) and their experiential understanding of that domain (know how). These abilities matter because they help determine effective problem solving and decision-making.

The ASC lab is situated at the University of Michigan and organizes research that is carried out both in the Psychology Department and the Research Center for Group Dynamics, ISR. Oscar Ybarra, Professor of Psychology, directs the lab.