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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Research suggests when volunteers are taught and required to practice rituals, they demonstrate greater trust toward others who practice the same ritual, and diminished trust toward those who don't. -
The use of solitary confinement in prisons has grown since the 1970s. Criminologist Keramet Reiter talks with us about the psychological effects that long-term isolation has on our minds. -
With repeated lies, the brain becomes less and less sensitive to dishonesty, supporting ever larger acts of dishonesty. But why do we lie and is it such a terrible thing if we do? -
As Republicans unveil their Affordable Care Act replacement, we examine how Medicaid expansion has affected divorce rates among older people. -
This week on Hidden Brain, the stories of two men who showed empathy for the other side and found themselves labeled "enemy" by their own people.
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Airbnb has come under fire in the last year following reports that hosts are less likely to rent to African-Americans compared to whites. New research looked at ways to address the discrimination. -
We hear a lot about senseless violence: people who lose their lives or their freedom over a stolen backpack, or perceived slight. Two researchers think social science might help prevent these crimes. -
Cars are less likely to stop when people of color step into intersections, a study says. That may partly explain why there are higher levels of pedestrian deaths among racial minority communities. -
Research suggests that college students are not having more sex than their parents were a generation ago. But sociologist Lisa Wade says the culture around sex has changed dramatically. -
Research shows that financial analysts have biases in things like gender and names when it comes to evaluating companies.
