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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In many areas, algorithms make fewer mistakes than humans. But new research suggests that we distrust algorithms when they make mistakes, in ways we do not distrust humans who make mistakes.
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Research finds the systematic elimination of losing coaches by NFL teams generally leads to weaker performance among those teams in the following few years.
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Research indicates the rise and fall of real estate prices seems to shape the decision among homeowners on whether to have children.
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Donations to fight Ebola are lower than expected. One psychologist thinks the reason may be the impact of hopelessness. A really big problem makes people less likely to give. -
New research suggests umpires are hesitant to make calls that change the course of the game, especially in games with high stakes.
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Analysis finds that federal agencies green-light projects in late September to fund them before the fiscal year expires. And quality suffers, compared with projects approved at other times of year.
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New research examines the effects of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month during which millions of people around the world go without food all day. Does religious practice affect economic growth?
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New analysis finds that the countdown clocks telling pedestrians how much time they have to cross the intersection actually increase traffic crashes.
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Analysis of innovation at private companies in the U.S. and across the world finds an inverse relationship correlation between disruptive innovation and the age of managers at those companies.
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Social scientists have learned you can't always believe what people tell you. An analysis of 3 places in the Muslim world examines whether peoples' reports of religious behavior match what they do.
