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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Food and clothing labeled small appeal to us, even when the labels lie, a marketing professor says. -
U.S. traffic officials who hope to get drivers to slow down may have found something that works: a GPS device that gives drivers a financial incentive not to speed. Some 12,000 Americans die every year in traffic crashes caused by speeding, according to government statistics. -
Two-thirds of Republicans say the president can do something about high gas prices; about two-thirds of Democrats say he can't. But six years ago, with a Republican president in the White House, those numbers were reversed. Researchers want to understand this flipped perception. -
Here's some science for the betting table: When a soccer goalie's team is behind in penalty kicks, the goalie will dive to the right 71 percent of the time, regardless of the direction of the kick, according to new research. Don't believe us? Watch this year's FIFA Women's World Cup final and see for yourself.
