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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Several years ago, sociologist Brooke Harrington decided to explore the secret lives of billionaires. What she found, she said, shocked her. -
Marriage is hard — and there are signs it's become even harder in recent decades. We examine how long-term relationships have changed, and whether we might improve marriage by asking less of it. -
Why did the #MeToo movement take off recently and not decades ago? The story of a playwright who was publicly accused of sexual misconduct in the 1990s and again in 2017 offers some clues. -
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. -
Can we improve concentration when our attention is constantly being diverted? Researchers found running electrical current through someone's head helps — but it isn't the most practical solution. -
This week on Hidden Brain's radio show, we tackled a big topic: power. From our conflicted feelings toward the powerful, to the ways we gain and lose power ourselves, and how power really can corrupt. -
We've all experienced miscommunications. Their consequences can range from hilarious... to disastrous. The actor Alan Alda — yes, that Alan Alda — wants to help us avoid them. -
The United States has always thought of itself as a nation of immigrants. So why has immigration been such a controversial topic throughout our nation's history? -
Recessions are painful for a variety of reasons. A new study shows that during the Great Recession, mortality rates declined faster in areas where the unemployment grew. -
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.
