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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When several states passed laws banning same-sex marriages, researchers found that the mental health of gay residents seemed to suffer. Conversely, stress-related disorders dropped after the legalization of gay marriage in one state. Researchers say negative media portrayals and loss of safety were contributing factors.
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Most Americans think of prejudice as animosity toward people in other groups. But two psychologists argue that unconscious bias — often in the form of giving some people special treatment — is the way prejudice largely works in America today.
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Sociologists tracked stock trades in Finland and found that accounts belonging to chlldren under 10 years old wildly outperformed the accounts of adults.
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Expressing regret may grease the social wheels, but not doing so boosts your sense of power, control and self-worth. Try explaining that to your boss.
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A controversial self-defense statute appears to produce more killings, according to a new study. Advocates for the law say it's working as designed. But researchers have different explanations about what might be happening.
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A controversial self-defense statute appears to produce more killings, according to a new study. Advocates for the law say it's working as designed. But researchers have different explanations about what might be happening.
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A massive analysis of some 350,000 students in 53 countries has uncovered a paradox: Students in many countries that are mediocre at science have an inflated sense of good they are.
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Food and clothing labeled small appeal to us, even when the labels lie, a marketing professor says.
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U.S. traffic officials who hope to get drivers to slow down may have found something that works: a GPS device that gives drivers a financial incentive not to speed. Some 12,000 Americans die every year in traffic crashes caused by speeding, according to government statistics.
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Two-thirds of Republicans say the president can do something about high gas prices; about two-thirds of Democrats say he can't. But six years ago, with a Republican president in the White House, those numbers were reversed. Researchers want to understand this flipped perception.