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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If being liberal and conservative is about political views, how come the labels describe other things? A social scientist says some part of people's leanings come from an unlikely source: their DNA.
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Schadenfreude is an emotion most people try to hide. But research shows people are more likely to exhibit this feeling if they are die-hard fans of a particular sports team.
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A recent study finds companies whose CEOs committed a personal indiscretion — such as infidelity, substance abuse and dishonesty — experienced a decline in shareholder value.
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The world is full of complex religious beliefs. This week, we'll explore how religions have evolved, almost like living organisms, to help human societies survive and flourish.
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This week on the Hidden Brain radio show, we explore how the constantly evolving nature of languages can give us different ways of understanding ourselves as well as the world we live in.
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This week on Hidden Brain's radio show, we tackle a big topic: power. From our conflicted feelings toward the powerful, to the ways we gain and lose power ourselves, and how power can corrupt.
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Researchers find that during extra innings, baseball umpires make calls in a way that tends to end games sooner. This seems to be because umpires aren't given additional money to work extra innings.
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Fake news in the U.S. is as old as American journalism itself. We explore the trade-offs journalists have long faced between elitism and populism, and integrity and profit.
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As many as 40 percent of students who intend to go to college don't show up in the fall. Education researchers call this phenomenon "summer melt," and it has long been a puzzling problem.