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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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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To test subtle biases, researchers sent state legislators identical emails about voting requirements. Some emails came from a man with a "Latino" name, and others from an "Anglo" name. -
Is Democracy a key to better levels of health in a country? That's long been the belief, but we hear about some research that shows that isn't always the case.
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Over the last decade, the average age of the top 100 tennis players has steadily increased. We look at why players over 30 are likely to be strongly represented in the upcoming U.S. Open.
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Scholars have long tried to understand how culture affects communities. New research argues that the parking behavior of drivers may tell us something about the economic productivity of nations.
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An analysis by two economists finds that winners of the medal, the most significant prize in mathematics, become significantly less productive in their chosen field of study after they win the prize.
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Millions of people around the world face difficult choices at the end of their lives. Researchers delved into whether stereotypes affect medical decisions when it comes to terminal illness.
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Analysis of freelance jobs suggests employers are conservative when it comes to hiring, and dislike candidates who have done a lot of different things.
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People sometimes avoid information because they're afraid of bad news. But this "information aversion" can lead people to avoid medical tests that could save their lives. -
Maybe we can learn from fish — they don't call a group of them a school for nothing. Researchers found that when 2 fish swim together, they make better decisions than when 2 fish are swimming alone.
