Shankar Vedantam
Shankar Vedantam is the host and creator of Hidden Brain. The Hidden Brain podcast receives more than three million downloads per week. The Hidden Brain radio show is distributed by NPR and featured on nearly 400 public radio stations around the United States.
Vedantam was NPR's social science correspondent between 2011 and 2020, and spent 10 years as a reporter at The Washington Post. From 2007 to 2009, he was also a columnist, and wrote the Department of Human Behavior column for the Post.
Vedantam and Hidden Brain have been recognized with the Edward R Murrow Award, and honors from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the International Society of Political Psychology, the Society of Professional Journalists, the National Association of Black Journalists, the Austen Riggs Center, the American Psychoanalytic Association, the Webby Awards, the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors, the South Asian Journalists Association, the Asian American Journalists Association, the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association, the American Public Health Association, the Templeton-Cambridge Fellowship on Science and Religion, and the Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellowship.
In 2009-2010, Vedantam served as a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Vedantam is the author of the non-fiction book, The Hidden Brain: How our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars and Save Our Lives. The book, published in 2010, described how unconscious biases influence people. He is also co-author, with Bill Mesler, of the 2021 book Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain.
-
Can tweets be analyzed to predict heart disease? New research suggests the answer is yes.
-
New psychological research explores a phenomenon known as the entourage effect. We hear why people like to create their own entourages.
-
In many areas, algorithms make fewer mistakes than humans. But new research suggests that we distrust algorithms when they make mistakes, in ways we do not distrust humans who make mistakes.
-
Research finds the systematic elimination of losing coaches by NFL teams generally leads to weaker performance among those teams in the following few years.
-
Martin Luther King Day honors a great African-American leader — so you might think it's a day many Americans would also honor prominent African-Americans in our lives today. But you'd be wrong.
-
Falling gasoline prices are a benefit to motorists — but those lower prices come with a hidden cost: increased traffic fatalities.
-
If generosity makes us happy, and lots of research suggests that it does, why do many of us find it difficult to be generous?
-
An experiment in Chicago randomly assigned train and bus riders to either talk to the stranger next to them or commute quietly. The result? Even for introverts, silence leaves you sadder.
-
Research indicates the rise and fall of real estate prices seems to shape the decision among homeowners on whether to have children.
-
One challenge in evaluating the effectiveness of different medical procedures, is that patients behave differently after different procedures. Is this true for patients getting heart surgery?