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.
-
Many immigrant groups faced prejudice and suspicion when they first arrived in the U.S. quickly turn around and exhibit the same kinds of prejudice and suspicions toward those who come after them.
-
A political fundraising experiment reveals: Small donors are more likely to open their wallets for political campaigns when they're told other donors who support a rival candidate are being generous.
-
The fallacy is that we are surprised when things that are supposed to vary a lot, come down one way a number of times. We feel the next case must break the pattern. In reality, there is no pattern.
-
Research finds the systematic elimination of losing coaches by NFL teams generally leads to weaker performance among those teams in the following few years.
-
Analysis of innovation at private companies in the U.S. and across the world finds an inverse relationship correlation between disruptive innovation and the age of managers at those companies.
-
It takes more than a decisive vision to solve intractable world problems, says Harvard leadership expert Ronald Heifetz. Instead, he advises his students — including budding heads-of-state — to think less like surgeons and more like psychiatrists.
-
China runs the largest censorship machine in human history, researchers say. But Harvard studies of Internet postings in China suggest that even vitriolic criticisms of leaders and state policies are not what officials want to censor.
-
Many obstetricians make more money for C-sections than for vaginal deliveries. In a recent study, these doctors were more likely to perform the costly procedure than doctors paid a flat salary. But when the pregnant women were also physicians, doctors seemed less swayed by financial incentives.
-
New research suggests that racial disparities and other biased outcomes in medicine, the criminal justice system, and other areas, can be explained by unconscious attitudes and stereotypes. But how do we get rid of subtle racial biases?
-
A large number of poor high school students, who say they are continuing on to college, fail to show up in the fall. The reason is referred to as the "summer melt." Students face many hurdles over the summer including lack of resources and mentors.