What’s Your Type?

‘A tremendous piece of storytelling and an acute analysis of the craving of the contemporary, secular imagination for certainties’ Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times

‘Emre is a masterful and nuanced storyteller. What’s Your Type is an impressive work of scholarship, not just a biography of two fascinating women but also a tightly argued and sweeping history of how the conception of personality changed throughout the upheavals of the 20th century’ New Statesman

‘The story behind the Myers-Briggs test proves an interesting one, and is told with considerable relish, vim and some savage comedy by Emre … This is a very funny book, and properly angry about the stupidity of the entire exercise’Philip Hensher, Spectator

‘Emre’s careful investigations of the tool’s bizarre origins and alarming impact weave a compelling narrative that recounts the rise of twentieth-century managerial and personnel-theory science with the gritty wistfulness of a John Steinbeck novel’ Nature

‘Emre’s book begins like a true-crime thriller, with the tantalizing suggestion that a number of unsettling revelations are in store. Inventive and beguiling… the revelations she uncovers are affecting and occasionally (and delightfully) bizarre. This is history that reads like biography that reads like a novel – a fluid narrative that defies expectations and plays against type’ New York Times

‘This is a sparkling biography – not of a person, but of a popular personality tool. Merve Emre deftly exposes the hidden origins of the MBTI and the seductive appeal and fatal flaws of personality types’ Adam Grant, author of Give and Take, Originals, and Option B with Sheryl Sandberg

‘Emre’s thought-provoking book is full of interest and she brings vigour to her investigation of Myers-Briggs.’The Times

‘A brilliant cultural history of the personality-assessment industry’ Economist

Merve Emre is associate professor of English at the University of Oxford and fellow of Worcester College. She is the author of Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America. Her work has appeared in The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and other similar publications.