Título: The Leap

Escrito por Ulrich Boser

DESCRIPCIÓN Y/O SINOPSIS DE ESTE EBOOK

We’re not supposed to trust others. Look at the headlines. Read the blogs. Study the survey data. It seems that everyone is wary, that everyone is just looking out for themselves. But a sense of social trust and togetherness can be restored.

In The Leap, best-selling author Ulrich Boser shows how the emerging research on trust can improve our lives, rebuild our economy, and strengthen society. As part of this engaging and deeply reported narrative, Boser visits a radio soap opera in Rwanda that aims to restore the country’s broken trust, profiles the man who brought honesty to one of the most corrupt cities in Latin America, and explains how a college dropout managed to con his way into American high society. Boser even goes skydiving to see if the experience will increase his levels of oxytocin, the so-called «trust hormone.”

A powerful mix of hard science and compelling storytelling, The Leap explores how we trust, why we trust, and what we can all do to deepen social trust. The book includes insightful policy recommendations along with surprising new data on the state of social trust in America today.

BREVE FICHA TÉCNICA DEL LIBRO

Formato del ebook: Kindle PDF EPUB MOBI
Tamaño del archivo: 1709 KB
Longitud de impresión: 176 páginas
Editorial/Editado por: Amazon Publishing (16 de septiembre de 2014)
Idioma: Inglés

OPINIONES:

An Uncommon Perspective on Trust
In order for people to get the most out of The Leap: The Science of Trust & Why it Matters, they will be required to take a leap of faith of sorts. In an America increasingly seized by cynicism and distrust towards our political leaders, corporate America, and even our own neighbors is fairly common, Ulrich Boser makes a fairly unconventional argument when he argues that human beings even in times of cynicism are hard wired to trust people. Further, trust is vital for the functioning of the institutions of civilization as we know it.
Now that Boser has outlined the stakes and the need for trust, he spends the next 173 pages writing in a very free and loose manner that strikes a middle ground between journalism and academia anecdotally about why trust matters and how to recapture it. His anecdotes feature a mix of famous people and people you might walk past every day. This gives the book a certain common touch because all levels of society are represented in the trust game. I was particularly touched by the Rwandan genocide section and the section on the people with Williams Syndrome.
It is a very brief read at less than 200 pages, yet the message contained in this book is a necessary message. By embracing cynicism, we are actually going against our human nature. Yet, cynicism hovers like a black cloud over much of the world. The Leap is a sobering reminder that mistrust is actually uncommon. Highly recommended.

A good light intro to research on trust. Goes a bit far with some conclusions, but it is thought provoking
If you like books by authors such as Malcolm Gladwell (Tipping Point, Outliers) or Steven Levitt (Freakonomics) you will like this book.
I think of these as «science lite» books, an outline of current research in fields like psychology or economics sprinkled with antidotes and a bit of history. It is pretty easy reading, and you will learn something while being entertained. This book does a good job of usually providing references to the actual research. But sometimes the author presents and idea and glosses over the science. For example, he maintains that two research studies show that there is an inverse relationship between political trust and homicide rates. The implication given in the book is that this relationship is causal. However, it could easily be correlational. For example, in elementary schools on average reading ability increases with shoe size, those with bigger shoes tend to read at a higher level. So can we conclude that kids with big feet are smarter? Nope, a little thinking and one realizes that older kids have bigger feet, and older kids usually read better than younger kids. That relationship (shoe size and reading ability) may be statistically significant, but it masks an underlying variable of age. It is a correlational relationship, not a causal one. Unfortunately here (at least in the advanced reader copy) he does not provide the references to the actual research, so I was unable to look up the source material. And two studies are not enough for a conclusion.
So, you need to have a little skepticism about some of the conclusions. However, I did find the book thought provoking, especially the chapter on politics and trust. Boser makes some interesting points, especially about how politicians are caught in a Catch 22, berate the government to get elected, and then become part of that government you just disparaged as being untrustworthy, making it harder to get anything done.
If you would like a straightforward and entertaining read about current research on trust, and realize that if you really want to understand some of these issues you are going to need to dig a little deeper this is a good read.

Informative read on an emerging field – over-eager conclusions
In an entertaining look at what the author calls «social trust», Boser looks at the biochemistry behind trust, mechanics/dynamics of how we develop trust, and the risks of too much trust. For the most part, Boser – the self-admitted «not an expert in trust» – weaves through interesting anecdotes and experiments to make some broad hypotheses. Very often (especially on biochemical aspects of trust), the causal relations of actions derived from trust and the body reactions to it are at best inconclusive. This may be more a reflection the early stages of research than an overly eager misinterpretation. Nevertheless, the use of events derived from recent news makes the narrative easy to relate to and Boser does an excellent job in introducing the associated research. Perhaps the only issue with the approach is that, while informative, there is not much actionable for an individual. A huge leap in argument leads to conclusions regarding how individuals need to feel part of something bigger and other broad social statements, that seem more wishful thinking than policy opportunities. In fact, the reader would have been served better if Boser adopted Thaler’s «nudge» approach and decomposed some of this observations to a more consumable and actionable form. Overall, an informative and entertaining read that successfully highlights an emerging field.