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.
-
Criminologists in Texas find that you are more likely to become a victim of theft if your behavior somehow marks you as being "outside the mainstream." One sign of such behavior: leaving copies of racy magazines and crushed beer cans in your car.
-
Political historian Allan Lichtman says he sees elections the way geophysicists see earthquakes 鈥� as events fundamentally driven by structural factors deep beneath the surface, rather than by superficial events at the surface. -
Results of a 1976 experiment involving masked trick-or-treaters still hold true today: We're more likely to do bad things 鈥� like stealing candy 鈥� when we're anonymous. And that tells researchers about the ways adults break the rules, too. -
Why do some leaders make little difference to organizations and countries while others turn out to be indispensable? Research suggests that what's key isn't personality or even the historical moment, but the organizational structure that produces the leader. -
Could modern cognitive theories explain character development in one of Jane Austen's most famous heroines: Pride and Prejudice's Elizabeth Bennett? Reading sessions inside an MRI scanner are shedding light on the question. -
Food and clothing labeled small appeal to us, even when the labels lie, a marketing professor says. -
Some dilemmas produce vivid images in our head 鈥� and we're wired to respond emotionally to pictures. That can trigger unconscious biases that influence our judgment of right and wrong. -
Online reviews of restaurants, travel deals, apps and just about anything you want to buy have become a powerful driver of consumer behavior. Unsurprisingly, they have also created a powerful incentive to cheat. -
An experiment that paired sounds with smells suggests basic forms of learning are possible while snoozing. The key seems to be a phenomenon known as conditioning 鈥� a form of simple learning made famous by Ivan Pavlov and his dog.
