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She needed to get closer, physically and emotionally. So she asked permission, got to know people, listened to their stories; some relationships went on for years.

How can parents foster grit in their children?The parenting style that is good for grit is also the parenting style good for most other things: Be really, really demanding, and be very, very supportive. By this I don’t mean material things; I mean emotional support.

In 2003, the Princeton psychologist Alexander Todorov began to suspect that, except for those people who have hard-core political beliefs, the reasons we vote for particular candidates could have less to do with politics and more to do with basic cognitive processes—in particular, perception. When people are asked about their ideal leader, one of the single most important characteristics that they say they look for is competence—how qualified and capable a candidate is. Todorov wondered whether that judgment was made on the basis of intuitive responses to basic facial features rather than on any deep, rational calculus. It would make sense: in the past, extensive research has shown just how quickly we form impressions of people’s character traits, even before we’ve had a conversation with them. That impression then colors whatever else we learn about them, from their hobbies to, presumably, their political abilities. In other words, when we think that we are making rational political judgments, we could be, in fact, judging someone at least partly based on a fleeting impression of his or her face.

Starting that fall, and through the following spring, Todorov showed pairs of portraits to roughly a thousand people, and asked them to rate the competence of each person. Unbeknownst to the test subjects, they were looking at candidates for the House and Senate in 2000, 2002, and 2004. In study after study, participants’ responses to the question of whether someone looked competent predicted actual election outcomes at a rate much higher than chance—from sixty-six to seventy-three per cent of the time. Even looking at the faces for as little as one second, Todorov found, yielded the exact same result: a snap judgment that generally identified the winners and losers.

The Chinese-language version of Wikipedia has become more than an online encyclopedia: it is a battlefield for editors from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong in a region charged with political, ideological and cultural differences.

Wikipedia editors, all volunteers, present opposing views on politics, history and traditional Chinese culture — in essence, different versions of China. Compounding the issue are language differences: Mandarin is the official language in mainland China and Taiwan, while the majority in Hong Kong speak Cantonese. But mainland China uses simplified characters, while Taiwan and Hong Kong use traditional script. That has led to articles on otherwise innocuous topics becoming flash points, and has caused controversial entries to be restricted.

For example, whether or not it says anything about how its speakers think, the fact that there is a language in New Guinea that uses the same word for eat, drink and smoke is remarkable in itself. Another New Guinea language is Yeli Dnye, which not only has 90 sounds to English’s 44, but also has 11 different ways to say “on” depending on whether something is horizontal, vertical, on a point, scattered, attached and more. And there is Berik, where you have to change the verb to indicate what time of day something happened. As with any other feature of the natural world, such variety tests and expands our sense of the possible, of what is “normal.”

The marshmallow study captured the public imagination because it is a funny story, easily told, that appears to reduce the complex social and psychological question of why some people succeed in life to a simple, if ancient, formulation: Character is destiny. Except that in this case, the formulation isn’t coming from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus or from a minister preaching that “patience is a virtue” but from science, that most modern of popular religions.

But how our brains work is just one of many factors that drive the choices we make. Just last year, a study by researchers at the University of Rochester called the conclusions of the Stanford experiments into question, showing that some children were more likely to eat the first marshmallow when they had reason to doubt the researcher’s promise to come back with a second one. In the study, published in January 2013 in Cognition under the delectable title “Rational Snacking,” Celeste Kidd, Holly Palmeri and Richard N. Aslin wrote that for a child raised in an unstable environment, “the only guaranteed treats are the ones you have already swallowed,” while a child raised in a more stable environment, in which promises are routinely delivered upon, might be willing to wait a few more minutes, confident that he will get that second treat.

Willpower can do only so much for children facing domestic instability, poor physical health or intellectual deficits.

The leading media outlet CCTV has provided a platform for many of the public shamings, which have included those of business people, screenwriters, celebrities, editors and journalists — anyone deemed to be on the wrong side of the Communist Party’s latest self-serving campaign. They speak to us from behind bars, their prisoner status made clear from their uniforms and (sometimes) shaved heads, their serious expressions and tearful faces.

“We’re in the service of truth. Sometimes that obliges you to take shortcuts of poetic license. You’re obliged to do it. You can take too many liberties, you have to find a line between it all,” he says.

Which shows how clueless I was, even then. Forgery is important because it exposes the ideological character of aesthetic experience. We’re actually not, or not only, or never entirely, responding to an art object via its physical attributes. What we’re seeing is not just what we see. We bring with us a lot of non-sensory values—one of which is authenticity.