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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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.
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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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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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If you believe something is real — if you can fall in love with someone or stand in awe of a painting — is it possible that it doesn't actually matter whether the object of your affection is fake?
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In the last five years, 12 percent of terrorist attacks in the U.S. were carried out by Muslims and more than 50 percent by far right extremists. So why the media focus on "Islamic terrorism"?
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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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This week on Hidden Brain: coincidences. Why they're not quite as magical as they seem, and the psychological reasons we can't help but search for meaning in them anyway.
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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?