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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Violent crimes committed by Muslims are much more likely to be reported as "terrorism." And that has disturbing consequences for the way Muslims are perceived.
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Imagine seeing a cockroach skitter across your kitchen counter. Does the thought alone gross you out? This week on Hidden Brain, we discuss disgust.
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A culture of racism can infect us all. On this week's radio show, we discuss the implicit biases we carry that have been forged by the society around us.
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Our culture has long expected that women will be kind, and leaders will be authoritative. So what's a female leader to do when she confronts these conflicting stereotypes?
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Marriage is hard — and there are signs it's become even harder in recent decades. We examine how long-term relationships have changed, and whether we might improve marriage by asking less of it.
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What has changed in our minds and in our culture so that allegations of sexual harassment and assault are being taken so much more seriously than they were in prior decades?
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The United States has always thought of itself as a nation of immigrants. So why has immigration been such a controversial topic throughout our nation's history?
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There are some topics about which it seems no amount of data will change people's minds: things like climate change, or restrictions on gun ownership.
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Chaos is a part of all of our lives. Sometimes we try to control it. And other times, we just have to live with it. On this week's Radio Replay, we explore different strategies for coping with chaos.
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What is it that makes you...you? NPR's Shankar Vedantam explores new research that suggests the labels we use to categorize people affect not just who they are now, but who they'll be in the future.