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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Could modern cognitive theories explain character development in one of Jane Austen's most famous heroines: Pride and Prejudice's Elizabeth Bennett? Reading sessions inside an MRI scanner are shedding light on the question. -
Food and clothing labeled small appeal to us, even when the labels lie, a marketing professor says. -
Some dilemmas produce vivid images in our head — and we're wired to respond emotionally to pictures. That can trigger unconscious biases that influence our judgment of right and wrong. -
Online reviews of restaurants, travel deals, apps and just about anything you want to buy have become a powerful driver of consumer behavior. Unsurprisingly, they have also created a powerful incentive to cheat. -
An experiment that paired sounds with smells suggests basic forms of learning are possible while snoozing. The key seems to be a phenomenon known as conditioning — a form of simple learning made famous by Ivan Pavlov and his dog. -
Psychology explains why people don't always do what they intend to do. Can it explain why many independents vote along partisan lines? -
Graduate student Robert Lynch is on a quest to deconstruct our built-in instinct for humor, and find out why making people laugh could be important to the way we've adapted to survive. -
If you had to choose between a silver medal and a bronze medal, most people would choose silver. But psychologists who analyzed photos of Olympic medalists say that there's a complicated dynamic at work. -
Scientists have long studied why some requests seem to be met with a yes while others get a no. Now, there's a new development: A study finds that asking for unusual favors can be very effective in getting people to comply. -
It isn't just that fewer women choose to go into fields involving science, engineering, technology and math. Even when they do and are successful, women are more likely than men to quit. Psychological research suggests the gender disparity may be, at least in part, the result of of a vicious psychological cycle.
