![]() Vedantam presents a fresh, bracing case for the dangers of group-think. The crisis vignettes are skillfully spun out, Grisham style. “The larger the group, the longer it took to arrive at a consensus.” His conclusion? “People can undermine themselves - and reduce the overall survival rate - by trying to help one another.” “Groups seek to develop a shared narrative as an explanation for what is happening,” Vedantam writes. What mattered wasn’t what floor the groups were on but how large they were. “The details about individuals - who did what, who felt what, who thought what - is noise.” He cites another analysis, of response to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, in which two different groups escaped at different rates. “Group decisions provide us with a signal,” Vedantam writes. While everyone felt they were making autonomous decisions, the decisions were really made by the group. The group on the 88th floor ran for the stairs and survived. The group on the 89th floor reached the consensus that they were not in danger - and perished. In a gripping chapter on disasters, Vedantam describes the snap decisions made by employees of one brokerage firm in the south tower of the World Trade Center in the crucial minutes after the first plane hit on Sept. ![]() While social cues grease the wheels of interaction in subtle ways, they can also create hazards. What binds this motley crew together? All are victims of some form of irrationality - those imperceptible forces that often prompt our actions in the real world, the ones that are at odds with our ideals. As with crop circles, all we see are the traces left by covert attitudes, never the perp at the scene of the crime.Ĭolorful characters form the backbone of the narrative we meet a bickering, long-married academic couple, a rapist with great teeth, a woman working the night shift at a tire factory, a woman suffering from a rare form of dementia and a cult member. “Unconscious bias reaches into every corner of your life,” he writes, thanks to a “hidden brain” generally inaccessible through introspection. Ranging widely from the role of social conformity in violence to snapshots of racial and gender prejudice, Vedantam draws expansive arcs between findings from social psychology and the nation’s sensibilities and voting patterns. His entertaining romp through covert influences on human behavior began as a series of columns, and true to its genesis, it reads as vivid reportage overlaid with a sampling of science. Vedantam, who until recently wrote the Department of Human Behavior column for The Washington Post, hopes to fill that gap. Most previous popular treatments of subliminal forces haven’t been data driven. Whether we’re yanked around by jealous gods, Oedipal urges or poltergeists, the idea that we feel powerless to direct our own actions has a visceral appeal, one exploited by Shankar Vedantam in “The Hidden Brain,” his exploration of the unconscious mind. ![]() He is also co-author, with Bill Mesler, of the 2021 book Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain.Invisible forces that control our behavior have inspired our best storytellers, from Euripides to Steven Spielberg. ![]() The book, published in 2010, described how unconscious biases influence people. 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. In 2009-2010, Vedantam served as a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. ![]() 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. From 2007 to 2009, he was also a columnist, and wrote the Department of Human Behavior column for the Post. Vedantam was NPR's social science correspondent between 20, and spent 10 years as a reporter at The Washington Post. The Hidden Brain radio show is distributed by NPR and featured on nearly 400 public radio stations around the United States. The Hidden Brain podcast receives more than three million downloads per week. Shankar Vedantam is the host and creator of Hidden Brain. ![]()
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