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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The researchers believe this is because politicians in gerrymandered districts are less likely to advocate for goods on behalf of their constituents.
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When we think of lies, we think of the big stuff. We say, "I could never do something like that." But big lies start with small deceptions. Dan Ariely talks about why we lie and why we're honest.
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Unpredictable things happen to us all the time. On this Radio Replay, we mark the new year with two of our favorite stories of loss and the change it brings.
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The desire to find our tribe is universal. We like to know who we are and where we belong. This week, how this fascination has led to a thriving industry built on the sale of personality tests.
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Compared to older siblings, second-born boys are more likely to go to prison, get suspended in school and enter juvenile delinquency. Why? Parents of first-borns are more invested in their upbringing.
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There's a difference between the stories we tell and the stories we like to hear. New social science research finds most of us like to listen to stories about familiar things.
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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?
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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.
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New social science research shows that women in the arts earn significantly less than men across the board.
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U.S. politics have long been marked by disagreement and even rancor. But 2016 feels worse than usual. NPR's Hidden Brain podcast offers one explanation why, from deep in our psychological frameworks.