Why you should watch the Traitors
When the unreality of TV shows the reality of how we make decisions
As far as possible, this post won’t include specific spoilers for the TV show The Traitors. But it will include anonymised examples of gameplay that has occurred or is possible, which some may count as spoilers.
It’s generally futile to try to read high-brow lessons into low-brow culture. So I’ll begin with a basic reason to watch The Traitors: it’s entertaining. Yes, it’s as moreish as a Pringles crisp, but not in a way that fills you with regret and a sense that what you just ate shouldn’t qualify as food1.
While the hype for its second season has irked some, you should resist the contrarian urge to eschew this show just because it’s popular. Sometimes things are popular because they are good, and this is that. If that’s enough you can go watch it now.
But if you’d like to justify your reality TV, then read on. Because while the format is light, there’s something weightier to The Traitors. While Love Island, Married at First Sight and Too Hot to Handle tell you little about anything2, The Traitors gives some insight into how we decide who to trust, and the role that plays in how we make group decisions.
The premise of the show resembles that of the parlour game Mafia (also called Werewolf). It begins with 22 strangers. Most of these players will continue the game as ‘faithfuls’, but on the first day three will be literally tapped on the shoulder to secretly become ‘traitors’.
Divided up into ostensible teams, they will take it in turns to eliminate players from the game. The whole group, which includes the disguised traitors, vote at an open table every day to ‘banish’ a player from the castle. Then in the night that follows the traitors meet in private to select a player to be ‘murdered’. After each elimination, the lost player’s allegiance is revealed (explicitly for the banished, implicitly for the murdered).
Where The Traitors diverges from its parlour inspiration is in the win conditions. While in Mafia the teams win or lose together by eliminating all opposition, The Traitors is basically a contest of individuals in which everyone is competing with everyone else for a cash prize3.
That’s because only players left at the end of the game can win a share of the prize pot. And so for most of the game, both traitors and faithful are competitors that could prevent you from winning that money, either by voting to have you banished or murdering you. Eliminating traitors doesn’t really matter initially4, because if too many go early then the producers tell those left to recruit more from the faithful pool.
Only in the final few stages does it matters who the traitors are and whether they get banished. That’s because the prize money will either be divided among traitors if there are any left at the end, or it will be split among the faithful. At this point it’s a team game – although both teams still have an incentive to reduce their side’s numbers, because the fewer players that are left the larger each remaining player’s share of the prize.
Popularity contest
As you may have guessed, what this game is really about is interpersonal politics. Contra the claim of at least one contestant from the last series, The Traitors is a popularity contest, where the key to winning is to keep people onside until you have to knife them.
This is evident from who makes it to the end, which tends not to be those most active in finding traitors5. While a correct accusation of treachery can temporarily protect a faithful from murder (on the grounds it would look super suss if Jeremy pointed at Bob and then was offed that night), this doesn’t protect you forever.
In fact, faithful players don’t look too kindly on people that discuss potential traitors with too much enthusiasm. Stirring suspicion against others is seen as potentially treacherous, although smarter traitors are likely to join existing mobs than inspire them.
Much behaviour is subject to a damned either way logic. Defending yourself strongly from accusations can be treated as evidence of treachery, though brushing off allegations too smoothly is also interpreted as suspicious. Almost everything can be interpreted both ways.
Perhaps that is why much voting is motivated by personal dislike or irrational thinking. Players are frequently picked up for minor slips that could (and often do) have innocent explanations. In the first UK series especially, people were often targeted for personality quirks, or in one case a physical disability that prevented the player from raising a glass with everyone else.
Similarly, independent thinking is stigmatised. By not allowing themselves to be readily persuaded by others, players forming their own conclusions risk not being seen as team players. By comparison, people who go on second or even third-hand accounts of events seem never to be criticised for it. As the viewer this can be infuriating, especially when said independents are being more logical than their peers.
These dynamics mean that every player is in effect playing a solo game of reputation management. For faithful and traitor alike, the aim of each day is not to be ganged up on.
Players that achieve that tend to respect the pecking order within the group. In fact, several challenges across The Traitors series have asked players to explicitly name who is the most popular, though any group of people will intuitively identify who has greater or lesser standing.
The most obvious way this presents itself is when a socially-influential person makes a suggestion and others follow it not on its merits but with a view to protecting their own social position.
Players likewise take a risk when they go against the dominant members of their group, who are likelier to be trusted as faithful players. This problem is especially acute when a faithful has suspicions that a popular player is a traitor. It is difficult enough to disagree with a popular player, but harder still to accuse them of treachery.
The upshot is that a good Traitors player will be someone who can protect their own reputation and build strong relationships, irrespective of whether they are a traitor or a faithful. For a traitor a good strategy is to build a clique that will defend you against accusations, while a faithful should do the same, ideally with one traitor in the group who will protect them from murder until the end game.
In the frame
When you accept that The Traitors is about individuals winning or losing, social astuteness and good strategy go together. But the third factor that drives the game is less conducive to winning, and that is the extent to which players buy into how the game is framed.
Of course the producers encourage players to think of the game in terms of good and bad, most obviously in describing participants as ‘traitors’ or ‘faithful’ and steering the spliced interviews in that direction. In cutting the show they also want viewers to see things in the same way.
The framing of the end game tends to amplify this, with faithful players wrestling with the potential that a friend they’ve trusted for most of the game could be a traitor. And when a traitor wins the game, it’s evident that those they’ve hoodwinked can feel genuinely hurt.
As one faithful loser put it at the end of one series: “That’s the game.” And in fact he and other faithful players had been seeking to stop the traitors winning for the entire show, it’s just that they had been presented as the good team.
Not that I can blame players for feeling this way. Even as a viewer it’s hard not to see the deception inherent in the traitor role as deplorable. Most of us have a natural distaste for deceitful people, even when their lies are harmless. No doubt it relates to our need for reliable allies in a more precarious evolutionary past.
And yet in this case it clearly acts against the players. Many struggle to reconcile the idea that somebody they like is a traitor. And one faithful player who is recruited to the traitors even struggles to accept he has been reassigned to the bad team.
The sense of goodies and baddies is felt deeply enough that they seem genuinely upset to have banished a faithful at the round table. And that is probably true even for those astute enough to realise that any elimination brings them closer to winning the cash prize at the end of the game.
Collective irrationality
You can overthink these things. The Traitors is a game show made with the objective of creating good TV, rather than ensuring a fair competition – whatever that would mean in these circumstances.
What makes it good TV is the combination of human conflicts and the jeopardy for the players, and in that sense it’s no better than the tawdriest dating show (or much high-brow literature).
But the show is also effective at demonstrating the madness of crowds and the poor quality of many group-made decisions. You’ll be unsurprised to learn that faithful groups will repeatedly round on some unsuspecting teammate on the slimmest of pretexts, and then be mortified that they’ve banished one of their own.
While it’s tricky to detect traitors, the only real clues being how others vote or try to persuade other to vote, the faithful are often genuinely poor at catching traitors, in a way that goes beyond recognising that you only win as an individual.
When players are still presented with logical conundrums where there is a rational choice, they often fail it. Many people are no doubt bad at basic reasoning. But I think it’s also that people are more preoccupied with maintaining their social relationships than finding the right answer to an abstract problem.
Readers can draw their own conclusions about how this relates to their workplace, personal friendships or even cabinet meetings in Downing Street. But whether you find the conclusion dark, hilarious, or some combination of both, The Traitors is worth your time.
I recently wrote an article which noted that Pringles’ makers once tried to argue that the product shouldn’t qualify as a crisp for tax purposes, so perhaps they’d also admit the case for it being food is a little shaky.
Too Hot to Handle is funny in a very knowing way, which is good. But it’s wholesome objectives become tiresome about halfway through each season. I have seen several.
The prize pot is built up through various Crystal Maze-esque challenges, but both faithful and traitors have the same incentive to make it as big as possible. It affects the main game only inasmuch as players have a chance to socialise during it. That makes it distinct from The Mole, a TV series with a similar concept but where the traitor has to sabotage missions to reduce the final prize pot.
One admitted advantage for a faithful in banishing traitors in the early game is that there is a larger group of potential faithfuls to be murdered that night, improving the odds of survival.
As with many points in this post, you have to allow that how the show is cut may be misleading about how certain players have played the game.