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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American politics can be nasty. Does that mean that it's broken? -
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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Only about 10 percent of nurses in the U.S. are men. Research indicates that ideas of masculinity prevent men from pursuing a career in nursing.
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Researchers studied nearly 2 million art auction sales and found paintings by women fetched less money than paintings by men. Disparities that plague parts of the economy also affect the art world. -
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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Our circle of friends may shrink as we age, and researchers say this is especially grave news for men's physical and mental health. (This piece originally aired on March 20, 2018 on Morning Edition.)
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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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We find comfort in the familiar, but do we find creativity? New research supports the claim that diverse teams are more innovative.
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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. -
The clicker became a popular tool for dog training in the 1980s. It has also caught on with humans — helping people to become better dancers, fishermen, golfers, and now, surgeons.
