There’s a moment watching a well-made reality TV show when you ask yourself in awe: where do they find these people? Each format somehow unearths a previously unmapped seam of humanity. The Apprentice specialises in grifters, The Great British Bake Off in softies, and Love Island in people whose ideal home is a tanning salon.
The Traitors, the latest British TV hit, is digging into a new demographic: its contestants are non-stupid people who like playing strategy games. The second series, airing on the BBC now, includes a chess coach who can’t stop talking over people, a clairvoyant who expects help from the spirit world, and an army engineer who preaches about brotherhood shortly before betraying everyone.
The show is popular for several reasons, including its setting in an implausibly cosy Scottish castle and its presenter Claudia Winkleman, the one person who can handle a fringe as long as a public inquiry. Ratings are 3mn an episode, plus millions more via streaming. It’s become one of those things, like Queen Elizabeth II and Greggs sausage rolls, that no one dares to speak ill of.
But personally, I’m starting to shout at the TV. The Traitors bills itself as “the ultimate game of deception, back-stabbing and trust”. Reality TV loves to rationalise itself in this way: remember when The Apprentice was going to teach us about entrepreneurship, and Love Island was going to help us to understand how to find a life partner? Well, The Traitors similarly underdelivers. Among all the back-stabbing contestants, maybe the biggest fraud is . . . the show itself? It is not, as fans would have you believe, some fascinating psychological experiment.
In the game, adapted from a Dutch TV show, there are 22 contestants. Three or four are “traitors”; the rest are “faithful”. The faithful ones have to identify the traitors, and vote them off one by one. If they succeed, they share the prize money. If they fail, the remaining traitors take it all. The overconfident contestants boast about their “gut feeling”. They try to judge other contestants by their body language and performances in the nightly roundtable discussion.
Please, somebody, put them out of their misery! This approach to lie-detecting is nonsense. It’s televised homeopathy. There’s plentiful research showing that humans are terrible at spotting liars on words alone. A meta-analysis found that people could distinguish truth and lies only 54 per cent of the time. Practice doesn’t help: experienced police officers fared no better than new recruits; they were just more confident.
The Traitors contestants don’t stand a chance. They point the finger at people who are deemed too quiet, people who are deemed too loud, and people who are deemed to vary between being quiet and loud. Apparently, it’s suspicious to be nervous and suspicious to be relaxed. The BBC could just as well broadcast monkeys throwing darts at a board. (With budget cuts, it probably will.)
The real world has started to twig that lie-detecting is a fool’s errand. The Court of Appeal has noted that “it is usually unreliable and often dangerous” to use a witness’s behaviour to determine whether they are telling the truth. Put simply, emotional, erratic witnesses may be telling the truth, and calm, trustworthy ones may be lying, even though they look you straight in the eye. So, as journalist Nick Wallis neatly explains in his entertaining book Depp v Heard, in cases decided by a judge, “very little consideration is nowadays given to the ‘demeanour’ of a witness.”
Instead, judges prioritise documentary evidence, which, unlike witnesses’ memories, has the added benefit of not changing over time. If you listen to a fraud, they may well convince you that they had good intentions — see Going Infinite, Michael Lewis’s book on Sam Bankman-Fried. If you instead focus on the trail of evidence, this falls apart — see the jury’s verdict on Bankman-Fried.
My problem with The Traitors is that there is no corroborating evidence. It’s like a cooking show with no ingredients. The contestants have no grounds on which to suspect people. In the group tasks, the traitors do not actually betray the faithful — they all work together to build up the pot of prize money. At the end of each episode, the traitors “murder” (ie eliminate) one of the faithful contestants. But the murders don’t leave physical clues: the producers just hand the victim a letter.
In theory, the murders can help the faithful contestants detect the traitors. For example, if Alex says that Jo is a traitor, and Alex then gets murdered, that seems like a sign that Jo was indeed a traitor. Except the traitors know this and might bluff or double-bluff. Which leaves the faithful contestants back where they started.
Unsurprisingly therefore, in the current series of The Traitors, the contestants have done no better than chance, which means their guesses are mostly wrong. Shocked, they attribute their bad luck to the traitors’ cunning, saying things like, “Somebody’s playing a very good game!” Relax, guys, it’s a coin toss!
Fans of The Traitors will say that the whole point is to reveal our misplaced confidence in our powers of detection. OK, it’s funny for a few episodes to see how baseless groupthink sets in. But the show is crying out for a contestant to point out the emperor’s lack of clothes: “Hey everyone, we’re no good at spotting liars. So instead of accusing each other of treachery, why don’t we stay friends and just draw lots?”
I’m sure the producers are too clever to let anything like this happen. They confuse the contestants, many of whom are reasonable people, by putting them in a pressure-cooker environment where they forget their better judgment. Halfway through the second series, they also mix up the format so that traitors have to “murder” in a way that leaves physical clues. But evidence-based sleuthing would make a very different show. And viewers are happy just to laugh at contestants’ hubris — in the same way that Apprentice fans would prefer to watch delusional morons over genuinely promising entrepreneurs.
The hollowness of reality TV is that to keep entertaining series after series, it has to veer away from reality. Watching The Traitors, I thought about the scene in HBO’s The Wire, where three police officers interrogate a suspect with what they convince him is a polygraph. In fact, the polygraph is just an office photocopier. When the suspect denies the crime, the detectives photocopy a piece of paper saying “false”. The suspect becomes distraught and confesses. The lesson? If you want to know how true deception happens, skip reality TV and watch a drama.
Henry Mance is the FT’s chief features writer
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