The philosophy of ‘The Traitors’ We cannot know other minds

In the original version of The Traitors gameshow, the prize was a mere 30 pieces of silver. The game’s first-ever winner worked entirely alone under stressful conditions, cleverly fooling the clueless faithfuls around him before murdering the target in plain sight with a kiss. But in the Gnostic Gospel of Judas, first discovered in Egypt in the Seventies, the old format was given a shocking new twist. Judas Iscariot was no longer represented as a bumptious self-starter in treachery, but rather as someone who had been secretly taking instruction from a higher power all along — from Jesus himself, in fact.

The new series of The Traitors has done something similar, but — spoiler alert — the producers have put a mischievous Welsh lady called Fiona in the Jesus position. On Wednesday night, the bubbly sexagenarian was revealed to her fellow traitors as the “secret traitor”: the person who had been pulling their strings for several episodes previously.

Out of all the contestants, she alone had known the identities of both traitors and faithfuls from the start. In this role, she had been anonymously producing a shortlist of murder victims for her three becloaked minions to choose from each week — much to the latter’s resentment at the time. “I am so annoyed about this … I do not require middle management,” complained self-styled “psychopathic teddy bear”, barrister Hugo, shortly before Fiona planted some well-timed seeds of doubt about him in the back of a car.

Presumably, Hugo and his fellow traitors were unsettled by the revelation of a secret traitor amongst contestants partly because — as so often for harassed middle managers, getting it from both ends — the goals associated with this new leadership role were very unclear. Were they to be helped or hindered? For Hugo at least, the answer would prove a negative one. But the presence of an uber-traitor also meant that the other traitors no longer counted as the apex knowers in the game: a fact which automatically made them far less effective at their job.

In previous series, existing baddies could be confident they knew the player identities of everyone else — all faithful — and could plan their chicanery accordingly. But with the new announcement, suddenly nothing was certain. Even the most unlikely suspects — manic James with his wild scattergun theories, or Amanda the worryingly overconfident ex-copper, apparently obsessed with pinning the blame on innocent Jade — might secretly turn out to be a criminal mastermind after all. So when the secret traitor’s existence was announced, but not her name, those in the tower immediately became much more like the faithfuls outside of it. Under those monk’s cowls, heads that had previously contained confident declarative sentences were now overwhelmed with tentative hypotheticals.

In past seasons, traitors have held nearly all the knowledge cards and so have had nearly all of the fun. Much less enticing has been the hapless lot of faithful know-nothings, wandering about aimlessly waiting to be picked off. This is presumably why, in early interviews with Claudia this time around, nearly every contestant was desperately twirling an invisible sinister moustache, covertly auditioning for the more attractive role. (A sample statement from Sam, an account manager from North Yorkshire, apparently unconcerned about meeting work colleagues later: “I’m a fantastic liar to people who don’t know me. I will throw whoever under the bus to make sure I win.”)

Granted, occasionally there have been odd things that particular faithfuls have known in the game that traitors didn’t — usually, about family relationships, like that of mother and daughter contestants Judy and Roxy, revealed early on this season. But even then, the rules of the game do not permit these private facts to pass into what Steven Pinker has called “common knowledge”: things that other faithfuls in the game know too, and know that you know, and you know that they know that you know, and so on. For that reason, they aren’t particularly useful for the group.

Sometimes, as Pinker also relates, a social convention develops that certain pieces of common knowledge may not be mentioned in polite society: for instance, that cameras are in the room with Traitors contestants, or that Claudia’s foundation makes her look like she has jaundice. But for our purposes, the more interesting point is that there is precious little reliable and relevant common information shared amongst faithfuls — and also now amongst traitors, given the new format — yet its presence is essential to good interpretation and effective strategising.

For if you are unsure, both about what other players believe and what they believe that you believe (and so on), then you can’t make accurate predictions about their likely actions, nor even properly understand the actions that you witness. Human behaviour is not just a collection of self-evident facial and bodily movements, accompanied by sounds; it depends on a background mental context to give it meaningful shape. To take just one example: when Jade took off her blindfold after traitor selection, Amanda became convinced that she looked “shifty” as a result of having just been tapped on the shoulder by Claudia, while Jade insisted (correctly, as it happened) that she had simply felt anxious and hot.

This scarcity of common beliefs amongst faithfuls, in particular, means that the game they are officially supposed to be playing is not the one they are playing at all. On paper, as a faithful you are supposed to be trying to work with others, identifying traitors and voting them out. In practice, for most of the episodes you haven’t a hope in hell of doing this. Every spoken utterance, gesture, movement of every fellow player, no matter how bizarre, is equally compatible with theories of guilt and innocence. A pompous speech about a murdered contestant at the breakfast table could be evidence of noble intent (see Kas, series three); or of fiendish malevolence (see Hugo, series four.) And your fellow players are likely to fumble any real intelligence you pass on to them anyway, since they have no idea whether to trust you. In the absence of jointly available firm evidence, radical mistrust disrupts the laborious process of getting several people on the same epistemic page at once.

A faithful’s real job for most of the game is to avoid arousing suspicions that will lead either to their personal banishment or murder. At the same time, it is in their interests to get rid of any fellow contestants that aren’t serving them in some way, whether these be traitors or otherwise. For another piece of common knowledge too impolite to mention out loud is that fellow faithfuls are your direct competitors too.

The best way to achieve these things is to appear brainless and easily swayed by the herd: to get behind whatever convenient theory some fellow player has just spouted, and look convincingly stupid in repeating it. (This, essentially, was the key to Kate Garraway’s longevity in Celebrity Traitors last year, though it was unclear whether this was by design.) To such ends, players need to make the most of what Pinker calls “focal points”: points of salience judged likely to loom large enough in the consciousness of fellow players, around which some kind of manoeuvre can be attempted.

For instance: key to the traitorous Hugo’s demise in episode three was a roundtable moment when Harriet, herself secretly a former barrister, confidently aired a theory. Had Hugo really been a faithful, she suggested, he would surely have been murdered already, because barristers are commonly perceived as very clever. Since he hadn’t, in fact, been murdered, he must surely be a traitor.

This is an extremely slim evidential reed upon which to hang someone, possibly saying more about Harriet’s regard for her former profession than any grasp of the facts. Still, along with a bit of odd behaviour at breakfast, it was enough to empower a majority of contestants to vote Hugo out. Here, thanks to the focal point of his supposedly intimidating employment status, faithfuls’ beliefs about other people’s beliefs were able to work together for once. For Harriet’s theory to be taken up by fellow players, no particular player had to find Hugo threateningly clever in person — which is probably just as well, since he manifestly wasn’t. It was sufficient for faithfuls to believe that other people — namely, traitors — would have believed him to be threateningly clever, had he been a faithful and not one of their own. And if faithfuls couldn’t even muster that last belief sincerely, they could at least believe that nobody else would notice they were only pretending to have it.

Perhaps there are some life lessons from The Traitors here, though not the banalities we often read about “building trust” or “effective teamwork”. Such deathly boring activities are intentionally absent from the format, and otherwise it wouldn’t be half as much fun to watch. Instead, the main thing to be learnt about reality from The Traitors — apart that is, from finding out about the terrifyingly fixed ideas of detective inspectors — comes via the negative comparison. Unless the circumstances are highly contrived, beliefs about other people’s beliefs about our own beliefs are usually nested in our minds like Russian dolls, and we usefully call upon them all the time to accurately interpret the social world.

Yet equally, on those occasions when you don’t really know what another person believes — including what they believe about what others believe, or even about what others believe that they believe — then you cannot reliably tell what it is that they are doing or saying, even as you watch their faces and bodies move or hear certain words. It’s almost as if there was a message here about overconfident interpretations of strangers we already suspect to be malicious or badly-intentioned; or even of those we assume must be benevolent and friendly. I myself refrain from applying this point to the current news cycle, for I believe that you are already aware of some of its possible applications — and I trust that you can bring them to mind if you try. Sometimes a kiss is a signal to passing Romans, and a terrible betrayal. And sometimes, a kiss is just a kiss.

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