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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When we're asked to do something, we often ask, "What's in it for me?" or "What am I going to get out of it?" Research suggests not knowing what you will get can sometimes be a strong motivator.
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A massive analysis of hospital data finds doctors and nurses are not following guidelines on washing their hands before and after they come into contact with patients.
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New psychological research explores a phenomenon known as the entourage effect. We hear why people like to create their own entourages.
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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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Martin Luther King Day honors a great African-American leader — so you might think it's a day many Americans would also honor prominent African-Americans in our lives today. But you'd be wrong.
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If generosity makes us happy, and lots of research suggests that it does, why do many of us find it difficult to be generous?
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An experiment in Chicago randomly assigned train and bus riders to either talk to the stranger next to them or commute quietly. The result? Even for introverts, silence leaves you sadder.
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One challenge in evaluating the effectiveness of different medical procedures, is that patients behave differently after different procedures. Is this true for patients getting heart surgery?
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Data from the Mothers Pension Program, launched at the turn of the 20th century, finds benefits on education, income and longevity. It's the first to document benefits over the span of a century.
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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.
