
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 °µºÚ±¬ÁÏpaper 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.
-
Why did the #MeToo movement take off recently and not decades ago? The story of a playwright who was publicly accused of sexual misconduct in the 1990s and again in 2017 offers some clues.
-
The desire to find our tribe is universal. We like to know who we are and where we belong. This week, how this fascination has led to a thriving industry built on the sale of personality tests.
-
New social science research explores the relationship between who becomes a CEO and family birth order. First-born sons are far more likely to be represented among the ranks of CEOs.
-
A new study shows that CEOs who invest in corporate social responsibility initiatives put themselves at significant risk of losing their jobs.
-
Being able to recognize faces is a crucial part of life. Some of us are very good or bad at it, but in general we aren't as good as we think we are.
-
New research explores our tendency to label mass shooters as either mentally ill or as terrorists, based on whether they are Muslim or not.
-
When Jessica and Royce James learned that they were going to have a daughter, they decided to raise her in as gender-neutral a way as possible. It was harder than they could have imagined.
-
South Carolina researchers have drawn a connection between low-income students' poor performance on math tests and the time of month when their families run low on food stamps.
-
Some new research says that many people use free speech arguments only when convenient, and as a cover for their own feelings.
-
A new study shows a connection between cigarette taxes and food stamps. When cigarette taxes go up, smokers end up spending more of their income on cigarettes and that leaves less money for food.