Your Book Taste Reveals Your Personality

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Dear reader, picture your bookshelf for a moment. Some of you probably have shelves packed with fantasy novels; others have rows of self-help books. But what if that bookshelf were actually a fingerprint of your personality?

There’s real research that scientifically proves this, drawing on data from more than 60,000 people. It found that your favorite book genres and tags can predict your personality with up to 47% accuracy. And this is the exact same principle behind the algorithm Netflix uses to recommend content to you right now.

Today, let’s unpack the structure hiding behind the word “taste.”

Two Languages for Measuring Personality: MBTI and the Big Five

To understand this story, we first need to understand how personality is measured.

In Korea, MBTI functions almost like a shared language. You’ve probably heard people say things like “I’m an INFP, so I love fantasy” all the time. But in academia, researchers mainly use a model called the Big Five (OCEAN)¹​ instead of MBTI.

Here’s an easy way to picture the difference. If MBTI is 16 rooms, the Big Five is 5 volume dials. MBTI cuts you cleanly in two — “you’re either extroverted or introverted” — while the Big Five sees things as a continuous spectrum: “your extraversion scores 72 out of 100.” That’s why it’s the model that’s been repeatedly validated over decades for predicting things like job performance, health, and relationships.

That’s not to say MBTI is bad. In everyday conversation, “I’m an ENFP” is far more intuitive than “I’m 72 on extraversion, 85 on openness.” It’s just worth keeping in mind that these are tools with different levels of academic precision. You might think, “Isn’t 5 fewer than 16?” — but if you count the Big Five’s opposite poles and midpoints, you actually land at least 10 to 15 categories, so it’s comparable, not smaller. Anyway, read on with an open mind!