The Flynn Effect refers to an increasing IQ average (by about three to four points) every ten years years. The Flynn Effect is a result of today’s advanced healthcare and improved living conditions. Also, increased emphasis on the importance of education in today’s culture has impacted this rising number.  

Hindsight bias refers to a person's tendency to overestimate one's past abilities after gaining new information that the person did not have at the time of acting. Jen gets mad at herself after looking up how to solve the math problem because she now knows how to do it and it seems easy to her in that moment, despite the fact that she did not have this information while taking the test.

Bandura's Bobo doll experiment involved children viewing adults act aggressively toward the Bobo doll. When left alone with the Bobo doll, the children acted in the same manner toward the doll as they had observed the adults doing. This supported the idea of children observing, then imitating, a certain behavior, which are two key factors in observational learning.

Seligman's work on learned helplessness began as a traditional classical conditioning study pairing the ringing of a bell with an electric shock. What surprised Seligman and his team was what occurred in the later part of the study, when the team changed the dogs' environment to give them a chance to escape the area administering the shock: because the dogs had been conditioned to understand that a shock would always follow the bell's ringing, they did not even try to exit the dangerous area. That is to say, they had learned helplessness.

Evolving the theory of behaviorism to include a social component, Albert Bandura introduced the concept of observational learning. He declared that humans are quite capable of learning by observing the sequence of behaviors and consequences in others. For example, if a young lad watches his older brother receive a reprimand from his mother for picking flowers from the flowerbed, he will learn that the same consequences would apply to him if he were to do the same.

Self-efficacy is a concept introduced by Albert Bandura as part of his theory on observational learning. While much of his theory focused on social learning, he also described aspects of learning that involved just the individual. Personal determination and self-knowledge are not Bandurian terms. Reciprocal determinism is a term introduced by Bandura but is associated with the interaction between the individual and the social environment.

Bandura’s experiment demonstrated that children who observe aggressive behavior that is praised or encouraged are more likely to mimic what they see. Scientist reached this conclusion by comparing these aggressive behaviors with the relatively unaggressive behaviors of children who witnessed aggressive actions that were not praised and negatively reinforced.