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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Workers with a strong sales record were likely to be promoted into managerial positions, yet they tended to be worse at managerial jobs than those who were low-performing workers.
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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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Flight delays and late arrivals have gone down since 1990. At the same time, airlines have increased scheduled flight times because flights are taking longer, and more time is spent taxiing.
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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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Social science research explores how our minds push away information that gets in the way of our feelings and desires.
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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.
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A study looks at the effect of housing vouchers on criminal activity. People who receive Section 8 vouchers are more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, but this effect only shows up for men.
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Whether people consume news in a social setting or alone can affect how likely they are to fact-check. Research suggests people let their guard down when they're in groups and become less skeptical.
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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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Child care centers don't necessarily hire the most qualified teachers. A new study shows that child care centers pick applicants who are in the middle of the pack.
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Research shows people are more likely to label an attack as terrorism if the perpetrator is Muslim. Terrorist attacks committed by Muslims receive more coverage than those not committed by Muslims.
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Don Laub was a pioneering surgeon — one of the first in the U.S. to perform gender reassignment surgeries, but tragedy came when he traveled to Mexico to provide free surgeries to children.