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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Sociologists tracked stock trades in Finland and found that accounts belonging to chlldren under 10 years old wildly outperformed the accounts of adults. -
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. -
The latest polls indicate 58 percent of Americans support same-sex marriage. In 1977, that number was 13 percent. One researcher says that jump in support isn't the result of a generational gap — it's that many who once opposed gay marriage have changed their minds or softened their opposition. -
Often times politicians pitch "the common good" when proposing changes to social policy. Psychologists now think this kind of appeal may backfire and actually unmotivate Americans. What is the effectiveness of different kinds of public appeals?
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Despite current trends, most parents assume their own kids won't grow up to be overweight adults. That 'optimism bias' has neurological roots, brain scientists say. -
Academics have long believed that parenting is a driver of unhappiness, based in part on a 2004 study by Nobel prize-winning economist Danny Kahneman. But a new study disagrees with that theory.
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Enthusiasm for universal Pre-K education is at an all-time high, and President Obama wants to massively increase the ranks of young children in schools and early learning centers. Some studies have shown significant and long-lasting benefits of early stimulation for children.
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Why do we reach for that handful of M&Ms and other high-calorie treats under stress? In prehistoric times, such gluttony was probably a useful response to scarcity. That "feast before famine" instinct is less helpful in modern times, when obesity is a bigger health risk than starvation – but evolution hasn't had a chance to catch up. -
Research from an Ohio sociologist has found that inmates "earn" illegal money in greater amounts after they serve time. Prison may serve as a classroom where inexperienced delinquents learn from hardened criminals — and become more dangerous criminals themselves. -
In the modern era, legislative attempts to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill are nearly half a century old. In many ways, we've made little or no progress. There are numerous reasons for this failure and those reasons explain why the odds of success of any new legislative initiative to the problem of mentally ill having access to guns is very, very low. These challenges explain why none of the three of the most prominent recent mass shooters — Jared Loughner, Seung-Hui Cho and Adam Lanza — would have been affected by any current legislation involving the mentally ill and guns. Loughner had not met the conditions necessary for reporting his name to the federal database and he obtained weapons legally from a dealer. Cho was not deemed at imminent risk of causing harm, and was not involuntarily committed, and he was therefore not reported. Lanza does not seem to have been involuntarily committed, either, and, in any event, he didn't buy guns from a dealer — he simply took guns belonging to a family member.
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Top schools often offer scholarships that not only include free tuition, but also free room and board for top students from poor families. Each year, however, colleges are confronted with a paradox: No matter how many incentives they provide, enrollment of highly talented, low-income student barely seems to budge. -
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.
