The Ten Types of Human: Who We Are and Who We Can Be by Dexter Dias

About the Book

This book will introduce you to ten people. In a way, you already know them. Only you don’t – not really. In a sense, they are you. Only they’re not entirely. They inform and shape the most important decisions in your life. But you’re almost certainly unaware of their intervention. They are the Ten Types of humans. Who are they? What are they for? How did they get into your head?

We want to believe that there are some things we would never do. We want to believe that there are others we always would. But how can we be sure? What are our limits? Do we have limits?

The answer lies with the Ten Types of Human: the people we become when we are faced with life's most difficult decisions. But who or what are these Types? Where do they come from? How did they get into our heads?

The Ten Types of Human is a pioneering examination of human nature. It looks at the best and worst that human beings are capable of and asks why. It explores the frontiers of the human experience, excavating the forces that shape our thoughts and actions in extreme situations. It begins in a courtroom and journeys across four continents and through the lives of some exceptional people, in search of answers.

Mixing cutting-edge neuroscience, social psychology and visceral true stories, The Ten Types of Human is at once a provocation and a roadmap of the hidden parts of us. It is a book to inspire; to refashion our understanding of our many selves and semblances, and ultimately to find fresh ways to be free.

Editorial Reviews

In defining and describing his human types, he draws on lab experiments, the animal kingdom, and all the literature you might expect from a modern behaviorist. Yet the main body of the book, the bits that transfixed and stayed with me, stopped me sleeping but got me up in the morning, were the human stories that Dias has traveled the world to find. His interviewees are always people, the most vivid flesh and blood, never case studies. And yet that’s not what’s so extraordinary about it: storytellers are rare, but not vanishingly so... Dias’s work as a human rights lawyer gives him this instinctive, urgent belief that all injustices, all catastrophes, exploitations, acts of violence, all human misery can be taken on and overcome, somehow, if the right people try and there are enough of them. His combination of rigor, idealism, and pragmatism makes fertile terrain out of the most appalling battlefields... I emerged from this book feeling better about almost everything. The ideas in The Ten Types of Human are a layperson’s opening into a fascinating academic field: but more than that, a mosaic of faces building into this extraordinary portrait of our species.-- Zoe Williams ― Guardian

The Ten Types of Human is a fantastic piece of non-fiction, mixing astonishing real-life cases with the latest scientific research to provide a guide to who we really are. It’s inspiring and essential.-- Charles Duhigg

This book is the one. Dexter Dias has written a game changer. Think Sapiens and triple it.-- Julia Hobsbawm, author of Fully Connected

About the Author

Dexter Dias

Dexter Dias QC is one of the most eminent barristers in the UK. A specialist in human rights law, he has spent decades advocating for victims and survivors of institutional power abuses. He is a Deputy High Court Judge, Special Human Rights Adviser to UNICEF, Chair of the Bar's Equality & Diversity Training Committee, and winner of the SMG award for Advocacy for Racial Justice.