Traitor or Faithful? The Behavioural Biases in Banishment

If you're anything like 99% of the UK population right now (at least going by my social media algorithm) then you’ll be hooked on the latest series of the Traitors. A beautiful Scottish castle, nail-bitingly dramatic roundtables, the quirks of human decision making playing out right in front of our eyes — what’s not to love?

We wouldn’t be able to call ourselves experts in behavioural science if a show like this didn’t get us thinking about all of the behavioural biases at play. So, let’s explore what we have spotted whilst watching…

The Bandwagon Effect

Picture this: everyone is sitting around the roundtable, keen to catch a Traitor. A couple of contestants have pointed the finger, with some attempt to justify why. Suddenly, everyone jumps on board, even those we just saw telling the camera their suspicions of someone else entirely. We ask ourselves — what is going on?!

The answer likely has something to do with the bandwagon effect. People doing something just because others around them are — even if it goes against what they believe in.

Confirmation Bias

Why is it that when someone is so clearly a Traitor, the Faithful reject even a sniff of the idea? Well — when a Traitor has masterfully manipulated a Faithful into thinking that they are the most honest and caring person ever, confirmation bias means Faithfuls only look out for information that confirms their existing beliefs and reject information that doesn’t.

Fundamental Attribution Error

We've all seen contestants getting ganged up on at the roundtable just because they are more introverted than others in the group. Like somehow this must make them a Traitor — despite there being no evidence of any correlation. When we are trying to judge people’s behaviour, we tend to overemphasise dispositional factors like personality. This fundamental attribution error is what has led to many wrongful banishments.

Halo Effect

The Traitors isn’t just all about the roundtable. Contestants also complete daily challenges to win money for the prize pot. Those who are consistently good at the challenges are labelled as a “team player” and therefore couldn’t possibly be a Traitor. Wrong! Here, the halo effect has transferred a positive impression from one area to another (good at challenges = good team player = Faithful).

Representative Heuristic

Once the Faithful have caught one Traitor, they start to rely on information about that person to help them to sniff out the next. “Ash was quiet at the roundtable and was a Traitor, Meg is also quiet at the roundtable so she must be a Traitor too!” It seems like a fairly sensible strategy on the face of it, but there is no one size fits all Traitor. Representativeness heuristic has caught the Faithful out here — believing that two similar things are more closely correlated (and therefore lead to the same outcome) than they actually are.

But let’s not give the Faithfuls too much of a hard time. It’s incredibly easy for us viewers to think that the Faithful are being completely fooled and that we would be much better at playing the game ourselves. But, we are in a totally different context to them and have a lot more information to go off (like, crucially, knowing who the Traitors are…). I’m sure each and every one of us would be vulnerable to the same biases if we were in that castle.