An extraordinary investigation into human nature, by one of the most eminent international human rights lawyers.
We all have ten types of human in our head.
They’re the people we become when we face life’s most difficult decisions. We want to believe there are things we would always do – or things we never would. But how can we be sure? What are our limits? Do we have limits?
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, uncovering the forces that shape our thoughts and actions in extreme situations.
From courtrooms to civil wars, from Columbus to child soldiers, Dexter Dias takes us on a globe-spanning journey in search of answers, touching on the lives of some truly exceptional people.
Combining cutting-edge neuroscience, social psychology and human rights research, The Ten Types of Human is a provocative map to our hidden selves. It provides a new understanding of who we are – and who we can be.
About the Author
Dexter Dias QC is a human rights barrister, part-time Crown Court judge and visiting researcher at the Universities of Cambridge and Harvard. As Queen’s Counsel, he has been involved in some of the biggest cases of recent years involving human rights, murder, terrorism, crimes against humanity and genocide. He chaired and co-wrote the influential Bar Human Rights report to the Parliamentary Inquiry into FGM, has briefed and written reports for the UN around gender-based violence, and works pro bono internationally with survivors of modern day slavery, human trafficking and Violence Against Women and Girls.
Industry Reviews
Dexter Dias is on the side of the angels, who turn out to be us, the people. He writes like an angel too. Uplifting and indispensable. -- Howard Cunnell, author of Fathers and Sons
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 behaviourist. 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 travelled 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 rigour, 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