The Treachery of Crowds

Human nature revealed in BBC's The Traitors

Christmas day in the Pasternack household this year saw the four of us becoming utterly hooked on a new reality series: BBC One’s The Traitors, presented by Claudia Winkleman.

For those who’ve not seen The Traitors, here’s how it works: 22 contestants in a manor house in the Highlands cooperate in daily challenges to put money in a collective prize pot. A small number of the players are secret “traitors”: if there are any of them left at the end of the game, they take all the money which otherwise would be shared. Each night the traitors choose one “faithful” to assassinate, eliminating them from the game, and each afternoon all the contestants vote to evict one of their number. It’s sort of like a cross between Big Brother and Golden Balls.

Ostensibly, the aim of voting people out is to root out traitors. There are other incentives at play too, though. Whittling down the numbers is beneficial to those remaining, since the fewer remain at the end, the bigger the share of the prize for each winner. You might also want to get rid of someone who’s unhelpful in challenges, someone who’s tried to vote you out, or someone whose vibe you simply dislike.

When it comes to identifying traitors, the contestants actually had very little to go on, since assassinations happened in secret. It’s a little surprising, then, that the contestants made virtually no mention of any of these other motives. Instead, they would repeatedly take stabs in the dark in the hunt for traitors, forming a cancellation mob that rounded on each contestant in turn, and then expressing horror and contrition when the latest victim, more often than not, was revealed to be a faithful.

At home, a lot of the time we were shouting at the TV in frustration at the contestants’ illogical behaviour. But I think the faulty logic and the hysterical group dynamics seen on The Traitors illustrate some interesting tendencies in human behaviour outside the game.

Whether you’re playing as a faithful or as a traitor, it is crucial that your fellow contestants think you’re a faithful, because once a critical mass of suspicion builds up, that’s game over. The trouble is, of course, that people have very little information by which to judge who is a traitor. The game is essentially therefore a challenge of establishing trustworthy vibes.

One way to do this seems to be expressing a level of faith in other contestants that seems bizarre to the viewer. “Well obviously it’s not me”, contestants would frequently say in conversation, “and obviously I know it’s not you either.” At other times they would be puffed up in righteous indignation at the idea that someone might be lying about being a traitor, or that someone suspects them of being one. (Remember: we and the contestants KNOW that there are traitors in the game, and that they are lying about it – that’s the point!).

“No you don’t know that!!!!!!”, we in our living room would howl, alternated with “But they’re meant to lie!!!!!”. But since the aim of the game is reputation management, these tendencies make sense. We do trust people who seem to place trust in others, especially if they make costly signals of their trust. This is probably a good heuristic: who's more likely to cheat you, someone who is constantly assuming bad intentions of others, or someone who would never think such a thought in the first place? Saying that you find lying unutterably dastardly and that of course you don’t believe your interlocutor is capable of it is a way of signalling low Machiavellianism. It’s only in this unnatural context, where trustworthiness is randomised with respect to personality, that these displays seem odd.

This need to signal openness and alignment with the group seemed also to produce a norm of extreme and ratcheting levels of emotionality. People would clutch each other and jump in the air to woop, cheer and shriek every time any new challenge or activity was announced. They’d sink their head in their hands and cry real tears whenever they learned that this night, as every other night, somebody had been assassinated. Everybody hugged and kissed each other with gay abandon, and told people they “loved them to bits” – reader, the series was filmed over twelve days.

And there’s more. One perplexing anomaly that came up again and again was that if someone survived a cancellation attempt (i.e. there was a movement against them, but some other hapless individual got more votes in the final count), this was seen as an exoneration. Sometimes the instigator would apologise for having suspected them, now that they’d been shown to be wrong according to majority opinion. Again, this can probably be explained by the need to remain in good standing and not depart too much from consensus. There’s also perhaps the fact that humans don’t seem to like holding onto uncertainty – just as when a “not guilty” verdict in a rape trial leads to the assumption that the complainant must therefore be lying, and not that we couldn’t prove anything and don’t know whether the accused did it or not.

This would be a very different show if it was structured to incentivise reasoning. Instead, because almost all clues to who is trustworthy are removed, contestants rely on vibes only. Even when someone was under suspicion, all they generally seemed to be able to do to defend themselves was reiterate their innocence. You can’t argue your case by saying “if I was a traitor, then I wouldn’t have done xyz”, because you cannot allow the tainting words “if I was a traitor” to pass your lips. In this very high paranoia, low information context, being associated with even the hypothetical of traitorhood could be fatal.

As a contestant on The Traitors, your aim isn’t to be the one to make the correct call on votes – it is just to survive to the end. There’s no personal incentive to make useful contributions to the deliberations over who is a traitor and who isn’t. In addition, there’s no harm at all in seeming more stupid than you are – in fact, this might even help you. The traitors would frequently choose victims for assassination on the basis of their seeming like they were capable of sussing people out. So if let’s say at one of the meetings you were to produce a notebook containing your reasoning on who the traitors could be, it’s almost a dead cert you wouldn't survive till morning.

The Traitors is gasp-out-loud, addictive TV. It is also a valuable lesson in the importance of incentive structures. A system is perfectly designed to produce the results it produces. A game might say on the tin that the aim is detective work and spotting a lie, but if it actually incentivises dumbed-down hysteria, then that’s exactly what it’ll get.