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.
-
The ongoing national debate over surveillance prompts us to take a closer look at the way Americans think about their privacy. Several scientific studies show that what Americans say they want in terms of privacy does not match the way they behave.
-
When several states passed laws banning same-sex marriages, researchers found that the mental health of gay residents seemed to suffer. Conversely, stress-related disorders dropped after the legalization of gay marriage in one state. Researchers say negative media portrayals and loss of safety were contributing factors. -
Anthropologists have long documented the differences in the extent of sexual coercion — including rape — in different human societies. But is it a vestige of evolutionary history, indicative of cultural activity or governed by power dynamics between females and males? -
Most Americans think of prejudice as animosity toward people in other groups. But two psychologists argue that unconscious bias — often in the form of giving some people special treatment — is the way prejudice largely works in America today. -
A lot of tragic stories have been in the news this week. To name a few, there was the Boston Marathon bombing, letters believed to be laced with ricin were sent to President Obama and other officials and the explosion at fertilizer plant in Texas. David Greene talks to NPR's Shankar Vedantam about the psychology of "crazy weeks."
-
Sociologists tracked stock trades in Finland and found that accounts belonging to chlldren under 10 years old wildly outperformed the accounts of adults. -
Expressing regret may grease the social wheels, but not doing so boosts your sense of power, control and self-worth. Try explaining that to your boss. -
The latest polls indicate 58 percent of Americans support same-sex marriage. In 1977, that number was 13 percent. One researcher says that jump in support isn't the result of a generational gap — it's that many who once opposed gay marriage have changed their minds or softened their opposition. -
In the modern era, legislative attempts to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill are nearly half a century old. In many ways, we've made little or no progress. There are numerous reasons for this failure and those reasons explain why the odds of success of any new legislative initiative to the problem of mentally ill having access to guns is very, very low. These challenges explain why none of the three of the most prominent recent mass shooters — Jared Loughner, Seung-Hui Cho and Adam Lanza — would have been affected by any current legislation involving the mentally ill and guns. Loughner had not met the conditions necessary for reporting his name to the federal database and he obtained weapons legally from a dealer. Cho was not deemed at imminent risk of causing harm, and was not involuntarily committed, and he was therefore not reported. Lanza does not seem to have been involuntarily committed, either, and, in any event, he didn't buy guns from a dealer — he simply took guns belonging to a family member.
-
A controversial self-defense statute appears to produce more killings, according to a new study. Advocates for the law say it's working as designed. But researchers have different explanations about what might be happening.
