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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To help ex-felons land jobs, many states have enacted a law that prevents employers from asking applicants to check a box to reveal criminal history. But these laws may not have the intended effect.
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Researchers examine the effects of student debt on the personal choices that young adults have to make. For example, decisions about whether to get married or when to have children.
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A new research study finds that students exposed to their very best peers became discouraged about their own abilities and performance — and were more likely to drop out.
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A political fundraising experiment reveals: Small donors are more likely to open their wallets for political campaigns when they're told other donors who support a rival candidate are being generous.
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The fallacy is that we are surprised when things that are supposed to vary a lot, come down one way a number of times. We feel the next case must break the pattern. In reality, there is no pattern.
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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. -
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. -
Researchers explored the effects of black and Latino graduation rates from medical school, following a ban on race conscious admissions policies in several states.
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Researchers studying the effects of marijuana faced an obstacle: they couldn't create an exact control group. But a change in drug laws in the Netherlands offered a perfect laboratory.
