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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Decades ago, a group of women accused a prominent playwright of sexual misconduct. For the most part, the complaints went nowhere. In 2017, more women came forward. This time, people listened.
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This week on Hidden Brain's radio show, we tackle a big topic: power. From our conflicted feelings toward the powerful, to the ways we gain and lose power ourselves, and how power can corrupt.
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Fake news in the U.S. is as old as American journalism itself. We explore the trade-offs journalists have long faced between elitism and populism, and integrity and profit.
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As many as 40 percent of students who intend to go to college don't show up in the fall. Education researchers call this phenomenon "summer melt," and it has long been a puzzling problem.
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There can be a lot of psychological noise involved in learning. And mental chit chat can make learning hard. One solution, silence it with a click.
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Many parents think they can shape their child into a particular kind of adult. Psychologist Alison Gopnik says the science suggests otherwise.
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How many ads have you encountered today? On this week's radio replay, we discuss the insidiousness of advertising in American media.
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It doesn't just keep them entertained. New research highlights an unexpected positive impact — and also shows that when a parent sings to a child, the parent can benefit, too.
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Olutosin Oduwole was a college student and aspiring rap star when he was charged with "attempting to make a terrorist threat." Did public perceptions of rap music play a role?
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The eugenicists were utopians, convinced that they were doing hard but necessary things. And that included making decisions about who gets to have children.