Tells us an awful lot about ourselves too. Social influence is by nature hypnotic, especially if from an authority figure. It what memes are, and it's how we get a lot of our learning. They are survival mechanisms.

And that's how kids learn to be afraid of bugs (or you name it). Training people to overcome phobias involves learning to tolerate and desensitize from the very thing they fear the most instead of trying to go back in time to investigate the initial incident (which may have occurred before verbal skills were formed). Be careful what you let your kids watch on tv!

Did you see the episode of Stewie when finally got to see a vagina?