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.
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The holidays are a time to give thanks and be with the people we love. But sometimes those gatherings can be a bit challenging. This week, social-science based tips for having the best holiday season.
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This week, the Hidden Brain podcast explores the science of fear — traveling to a haunted house curated by a scientist to investigate what scares us, and why some people enjoy feeling fear.
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New research finds that e-signatures can potentially make people behave in more dishonest ways.
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New social science research explores why the unemployment rate for blacks is persistently worse than the unemployment rate for whites.
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Gamblers like to win but. But research shows they also get a thrill by simply getting close to a win. A look at the science of near misses.
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A Maryland program designed to help struggling homeowners ended up contributing to foreclosures in some cases. Researchers say it's an example of unintended consequences of some government policies.
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A study finds that children who demonstrate more "pro-social" skills — those who share more and who are better listeners — are more likely to have jobs and stay out of trouble as young adults.
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To increase the number of organ donors in the U.S., psychologists have advocated for changes to how we ask people to donate. In California, officials tried something new — but it may have backfired.
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An economist in the United Kingdom looked at how 150 TV series finales affected the U.S. stock market. He observed a decrease in stock returns on the following trading day.
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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.