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 social science research explores the relationship between who becomes a CEO and family birth order. First-born sons are far more likely to be represented among the ranks of CEOs.
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When we're overstretched and stressed out, we can often make mistakes at work or at home. This week, we explore a tool that surgeons and pilots use to avoid errors in high-stakes situations.
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What does it mean to be a boy and what does it mean to be a girl? We delve into debates over gender – and explore how some people are moving beyond labels and building gender identities of their own.
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When Jessica and Royce James learned that they were going to have a daughter, they decided to raise her in as gender-neutral a way as possible. It was harder than they could have imagined.
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South Carolina researchers have drawn a connection between low-income students' poor performance on math tests and the time of month when their families run low on food stamps.
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New research suggests Donald Trump's attacks on groups such as Muslims and Mexicans are changing our views of what's acceptable to say.
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Finding a new job may be the solution to your woes at work. But there may also be other ways to get more out of your daily grind.
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A study from the University of Kentucky shows that doing something virtuous can make indulging later even more pleasurable.
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Being able to recognize faces is a crucial part of life. But why are some of us so good or bad at it, and how skilled at it are we on average? The answers may surprise you.
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Pundits and prognosticators make predictions all the time: about everything from elections, to sports, to global affairs. This week, we explore why they're often wrong, and how we can all do better.