Analysis: The Traitors makes for captivating TV, with a wide array of human behaviour on display, ripe for analysing from the couch
*Contains spoilers for The Traitors Ireland*
The cloaks are on, the daggers are at the ready and the murdering hour is upon us. With such a wide range of human behaviour on display, The Traitors has been called 'a masterclass in human manipulation' and ‘a field day for psychologists’ and viewers alike. We watch as contestants form first impressions, build relationships (or alliances) and strategise, against a backdrop of deception and betrayal, influence and trust.
So what can The Traitors teach us about human psychology?
Firstly, we like to divide people into groups of 'us' and 'them' (this is called social identity theory). "You might see someone that you identify with in some way, maybe it’s their age, gender, job, race, and we build groups and create the ‘us and them’. Then we adopt a kind of group identity into our self concept," says Brendan Rooney, Assistant Professor in the UCD School of Psychology and Director of the Media and Entertainment Psychology Lab.
In The Traitors, this happens in an accelerated way because people are alone and cut off from their usual surroundings, feeling vulnerable and nervous. "They don't have all the information. So they might seek to connect with people quickly and then create smaller groups." That all comes into play when it comes to The Traitors. "You might have a group of friends that you make on day one, and then someone drops a name, or they're suspicious, and that group thing starts to happen: they all agree with each other. We're full of those sorts of biases," says Rooney. We’re very influenced by the group, especially in ambiguous situations where we’ve got little information to go on and someone else in the group might seem confident, he adds.
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Once we're in those groups, we become vulnerable to something called attribution bias. "When it comes to our reasons for doing anything, we can say it's because of the situation we're in or it's because of our personality," says Rooney. So if you do something bad, you might be inclined to say it was the situation you were in. But if you do something good, you might say it’s because of who you are, or your personality. We tend to flip that for the out-group, the group we’re not in: "so when they do something good we say it was the situation, and when they do something bad we say it was their personality".
Another aspect impacting us - and on participants on the show - is confirmation bias. The players start out with very little information about each other and end up making decisions based on "the tiniest things," something the contestants often remark on. But the problem is that early on in the game, they might "over-trust their abilities" to judge someone's character, Rooney says.
We see this clearly in episode one of The Traitors Ireland, where from the get go the contestants largely agree on one person to eliminate. "[The person] ends up being a Faithful and everyone is really upset that they got it wrong. They all reflect on how they could have let this happen. But there are classic studies from social psychology on conformity that show us that it's a really powerful influence when it's an ambiguous situation."
When it comes to strategy in the game, using that ambiguity is "a great way to stay under the radar," says Rooney. "You speak up and the Traitors could get you. You don't speak up and then maybe you're cut. So there's something about staying in the middle that seems to be a wise strategy early on."
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Why is it so hard to identify a traitor? Are we bad at detecting deception?
Watching at home, where we have the benefit of knowing who the three Traitors are, it’s easy to wonder how it can be so difficult for the contestants to figure it out. But there’s an imbalance of information there, with the Traitors operating with superior knowledge and the rest left questioning their ability to read other people and situations.
As humans we’re really good at "reading minds" and we start to build our social cognition skills from a young age, says Rooney. Children develop their ability to read body language or facial expressions when they’re trying to read their parents or while interacting with other children etc. But when we have little information to go on, it can be hard to figure out whether someone is deceiving us. This comes in handy on a show like The Traitors. Because while we’re very skilled at reading social information, we’re also very skilled at portraying or displaying social information to achieve what we want to, he says.
This is obvious on the show, where the Traitors have to perform trustworthiness and also in the way that some people choose to hide existing relationships (like Cork father and son duo, Paudie and Andrew) or jobs, for example.
Why do we find someone trustworthy and can we generally trust that instinct?
The Traitors is a game of strategy where your ability to read other people and decide whether they can be trusted is key to the decisions you make. But can we actually trust ourselves to know whether someone is trustworthy? "We have this automatic, instant emotional or physiological reaction to the situation we're in, and then we have this slower, conscious way of processing information. They both happen in parallel and often the conscious one is what we think of as traditional thinking. In The Traitors they're logically deducing what people are doing and saying, but they also often talk about a gut reaction," says Rooney.
That gut reaction is influenced by our experiences in life. "There's a really interesting theory called the somatic marker hypothesis, from Antonio Damasio. He talks about how we have emotional experiences through our life and then they leave these somatic markers with us. We actually learn from them very quickly. Then we're walking around the world - or in a situation like The Traitors - and we’re reading our bodies’ signals."
Those signals are coloured by our past. "So when one of the people in there reminds me of a family member or a friend, maybe I'm really likely to trust them because my body is telling me they smile or move like someone I know. Or the very opposite is that I've had a bad experience with an old work colleague, a boss, or a bully in primary school, and they have the same mannerisms or move the same way." That’s why the "vibes" we get off someone can influence us so much. "We're getting a sense of anxiety or we're getting a feeling of relaxedness, and that's playing a big part in how we interpret a situation."
And that interpretation or gut feeling isn’t perfect. "Especially early on because we could be completely wrong when we don't really know someone," sats Rooney. "Also we could be reading their anxiety as guilt for something, or their confidence for trustworthiness. But as people move through the show, their emotions are learning as they go through those different tasks and missions. So as they’re getting to know people, those same somatic markers are going to be now tagged to the actual people they're about."
In episode one of The Traitors Ireland, we see Niall, 25, tell the camera that "Michele is like my mummy in here." Connections like that "100%" impact someone’s feelings on whether another player is a Traitor or a Faithful, says Rooney. (By the end of episode two, he’s been eliminated and Michele sees it as a "personal attack" on her.)
That kind of decision making that relies on your gut is "really functional an adaptive for a person to do when they've no other information. But in the show, where people have these really explicit motivations to deceive, at the earlier stages it's better either to be random (in who you point out as a Traitor) or to try and ignore your gut," he says. "You don't hear that enough. Sometimes your gut is wrong in those situations."
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
