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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With the Olympics in full swing, we look at the myriad ways losing a competition can wreak havoc on our physical and mental health.
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The rush of victory or crush of defeat in the Olympics can flash by very quickly. But if you slow those moments down, there's a lot to learn about human behavior.
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Summer vacations often take time, energy and money to plan. Expectations can run unreasonably high. This week, we dive into what social science research says about how to have a better getaway.
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Research shows that bettors are drawn to certain games not because of financial motives but because they get enjoyment out of them.
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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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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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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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It takes more than a decisive vision to solve intractable world problems, says Harvard leadership expert Ronald Heifetz. Instead, he advises his students — including budding heads-of-state — to think less like surgeons and more like psychiatrists.