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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Have you ever noticed that when something important is missing in your life, your brain can only seem to focus on that missing thing? Two researchers have dubbed this phenomenon "scarcity."
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Boys get the message quickly: a man is supposed to be strong and independent. That message, researchers say, has widespread consequences for men's social lives and physical health.
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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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A new study finds that counties with teams in the Super Bowl experienced significantly higher influenza deaths for people 65 and older compared to counties that didn't have a team that participated.
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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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It can seem arbitrary the way certain people fascinate us. But researcher Elizabeth Currid-Halkett says celebrity has a formula. So does being part of any social group — perhaps even your own.
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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 new study indicates that smoking bans, which were designed to affect adults' behavior, in fact improve children's health.
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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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New social science research explores the relationship between who becomes a CEO and family birth order. First-born sons are far more likely to be represented among the ranks of CEOs.