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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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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A culture of racism can infect us all. On this week's radio show, we discuss the implicit biases we carry that have been forged by the society around us.
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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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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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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 shows that CEOs who invest in corporate social responsibility initiatives put themselves at significant risk of losing their jobs.
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Some new research says that many people use free speech arguments only when convenient, and as a cover for their own feelings.
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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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Don Laub was a pioneering surgeon — one of the first in the U.S. to perform gender reassignment surgeries, but tragedy came when he traveled to Mexico to provide free surgeries to children.
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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.