Shankar Vedantam

Shankar Vedantam is a reporter with National Public Radio. In 2009-2010, he was a Nieman fellow at Harvard University. Between 2006 and 2009, he wrote the popular Department of Human Behavior column in the Washington Post. The column applied insights from psychology and other social sciences to topical news events.

The Hidden Brain is Shankar's new book about the effects of unconscious bias in everyday life. It explores everything from how small children form biases to how nations go to war, from why people choose particular candidates in an election to how they respond to emergency warnings. The Hidden Brain is not a book that asserts that conscious intention does not exist; it merely argues that conscious intention plays a much smaller role in everyday life than most of us imagine. The applications of this idea are immense. From patients battling mental disorders to policy makers weighing whether to intervene in an unfolding genocide, the hidden forces at play in our life shape our odds of success, our chances of survival, and our moral decisions.

You can learn more about The Hidden Brain at hiddenbrain.org, form your own discussion group about how unconscious bias affects your profession, community and interests at facebook.com/HiddenBrain and follow Shankar's updates about the effects of bias in everyday life at twitter.com/HiddenBrain.