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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Since the Sept. 11 attacks, FBI hate crime data and census trends show that states with the strongest backlash against Muslims saw decreased rates of assimilation among Muslim immigrants in America.
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Shankar speaks with Noah Charney, author of The Art of Forgery, about what motivates art forgers. Also this week on Hidden Brain: why we love studies that prove wine connoisseurs wrong. -
Ahead of the climate talks in Paris, researchers stress the importance of psychological research. Studies indicate countries could walk away from a deal even if it is in their best effort to agree.
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Economists talk about moral hazards. When you protect people against risk you prevent bad things from happening. But something curious happens: Some start to take more risks because they feel safer.
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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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When the same athletes succeed over and over at a sport, is it because they are simply more talented than everyone else, or is it because "nothing succeeds like success"?
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Most people assume they will be better understood by close friends or their partners than by strangers. Most people are wrong.
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For many years people have puzzled over why countries that get richer don't seem to get happier. Now, researchers have an answer.
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New research finds that putting in partitions in grocery carts can increase the likelihood shoppers buy healthy fruits and veggies. (This piece initially aired on May 26, 2015 on Morning Edition.)
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Girls often outperform boys in science and math at an early age but are less likely to choose tough courses in high school. An Israeli experiment demonstrates how biases of teachers affect students.
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Research indicates companies with owners from countries that have been shown to have higher levels of corruption are more likely to evade taxes in the United States.
