Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Rebecca Wheeler-Mundy, talks to us about how to detect deception and recognise unconscious bias citing the hugely popular TV show, The Traitors.
*There may be some spoilers ahead for the current series of The Traitors UK*
Like many others, I am currently gripped by The Traitors. We may have only just recovered from watching perhaps the most unlikely of traitors take the prize in Celebrity Traitors, but a fresh group of players have entered the castle for the new series of The Traitors UK.
“Now is sort of proper detective work”
The Traitors is something of a masterclass in how a number of psychological concepts play out in real world settings with all manner of interesting group dynamics at play. As a psychology researcher specialising in how psychology can be applied to police investigations and criminal justice, I’m most interested in how the faithful go about hunting and banishing traitors.
As Harriet said back in episode 1, the job of the faithful is to play detective. There are parallels with criminal justice as players gather evidence, question their suspects, and engage in a form of jury deliberation during roundtable discussions. The current Team Faithful have done a reasonable job of identifying traitors...certainly better than their recent celebrity counterparts who took the record for the longest time taken to find a traitor. Despite this, there have been a number of mistaken banishments and the number of theories and accusations flying around often leaves viewers asking how the faithful can get it so wrong and let the traitors off so lightly.
As students on our BSc Psychology module The Psychology of Policing and Criminal Justice and our MSc Forensic Psychology module The Psychology of Law and Justice will understand, the kinds of investigative processes the players are engaging in are not as straightforward as we might like to think. In particular, we can see where bias can creep into the players’ investigations and influence their conclusions.
“The vibe is definitely different…”: Confirmation bias and attribution errors
One prime example of this is known as confirmation bias. Confirmation bias describes the tendency to seek out information that supports our believes and disregard information which does not align with our pre-existing ideas. In the context of The Traitors, once a theory has been put forwards, any ‘evidence’ is interpreted in the light of this theory, while contradictory evidence is disregarded or made to fit. This links with attribution errors – the behaviour of others is interpreted through the lens of their potential role as faithful or traitor.
Character traits are often referred to as signalling someone as being among the “most faithful”, even though their assigned role is beyond the control of players, at least in the early stages of the game. Similarly, we see a lot of talk of ‘changed vibes’ following the selection of traitors or after a suspected recruitment. Physiological stress reactions or normal memory errors (such as slight variations in what is remembered across different retellings of events) are seen as indicating the guilt of a traitor. This leaves players – such as Jade in the current series – repeatedly having to defend themselves.
These kinds of bias can impact many different kinds of group dynamics and decision-making. Students on our BSc Psychology degrees will learn more about social influence and cognitive biases throughout their degree. But as students on our MSc Forensic Psychology course will know, cognitive biases can also influence real world investigations. Contextual information about cases can shape case outcomes, including judgements of what we think of as impartial forensic evidence such as fingerprint analysis (I often recommend the work of Dr Itiel Dror if students want to find out more).
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“An itch you have to scratch and you have to just go for it”: Tunnel vision
Once the players have identified a target for banishment, however biased the investigation that led them there might have been, they can fall victim to tunnel vision. At this point we tend to see limited attempts to consider other possibilities. As Jade put it, it’s very easy to “hyper-fixate on things.” Players can get stuck on one possible theory and we see roundtable discussions where players refer to finding it hard to move on until they know the truth about their suspicions. This is may be put forwards as a reason for a roundtable vote, despite other plausible options. It is this approach which ends with faithful players as sacrificial lambs.
Again, this parallels real world investigations. One common argument is that tunnel vision plays a key role in wrongful convictions. In other words investigators identify a suspect and stop looking for alternatives. This can be particularly dangerous when accompanied by confirmation biases – an investigator’s judgements might be biased by contextual information, which then leads to the disregarding of evidence which does not support their case (Williamson, 2013). While this is something to be cautious of, researchers have highlighted that the demands on police investigators are not compatible with an expectation that investigators will conduct a thorough investigation and collect evidence on all possible suspects (Snook & Cullen, 2008). There have to be realistic expectations and a willingness to rely on the officers’ training and expertise.
“Could you imagine if one of us was secretly a detective? Plot twist”: Reliance on expertise
We often see players strategically reveal or conceal aspects of their lives away from the show (such as their job or course of study) in an attempt to control the image they portray. This series has been particularly interesting because of the amount of experience players bring, among them a barrister (Hugo), former barrister and author of crime/psychological thrillers (Harriet), a psychologist (Ellie) and a retired senior police detective (Amanda). The reactions of other players when this information has been revealed is quite telling.
For example, Amanda was more trusted post-banishment when players learned about her police background. We saw players revisiting her words and seeming to take this more seriously. This isn’t entirely surprising. Amanda described her background as being in covert policing and intelligence so we can assume she had extensive training during her career and was well practiced in observation, rapport building and asking the right kinds of questions. Students on our psychology programmes will know how important these skills are in investigations. But this doesn't mean that highly trained detectives are bias-free and carries implications for how they make investigative judgements.
“Do you commit to lie and deceive?”: Detecting deception
One key area where the investigations of the faithful fall apart is when it comes to detecting deception. Much as we might like to believe otherwise, people are generally not good lie detectors. In fact, psychological research consistently puts judgements about whether a person is telling the truth or not at about the level of chance (Bond & DePaulo, 2008). So what about trained professionals? Well, as we saw with the Amanda-Jade standoff, criminal justice professionals often perform at about the same level as the general public. In fact, where the public have a slight tendency to believe someone is honest (a truth bias) we tend to see the opposite pattern for criminal justice professionals (an investigator bias. Meissner & Kassin, 2002; Bradford & Goodman-Delahunty 2008).
In The Traitors, players expect to be lied to and so we perhaps see a tendency to assume deception, even where there is none. This might not be too surprising, players are working in situations where they have limited insight into the baseline behaviours of others. This means that they rely heavily on intuition and often use the wrong cues to decide whether someone is lying. In general, people (both police officers and the public) tend to rely on non-verbal cues (like avoiding someone’s gaze) to signal deception. In fact, research shows that these cues are unreliable, with verbal cues considered more reliable (Bogaard et al., 2016).
But what about Rachel’s FBI-style training on micro-expressions and her efforts to profile the other players? Well, apologies to Rachel (and to any aspiring ‘Lie to Me’ style investigators) but those months of training might not have been the best use of time. Perhaps the most widely recognised of these is the Micro-Expressions Training Tool (METT) developed by the Paul Ekman Group. Micro-expressions are very brief expressions of an emotion which appear when someone tries to hide their true emotions. There is some evidence that the METT can improve recognition of emotional expressions, but the evidence that the METT improves detection of deception is much more mixed. In fact, some research has shown that participants trained in METT did no better at detecting deception than those taking part in bogus training or no training with overall accuracy slightly below chance (Jordan et al., 2019).
Putting it all together
The Traitors provides a real insight into how psychological principles play out in real life. Ultimately this is an entertainment show and relatively low stakes – however much it may feel otherwise to contestants. But as students on our MSc Forensic Psychology course will know, these principles can also influence real police investigations. That is where psychology has a responsibility to identify these biases and work with those on the ground to develop approaches to overcome them.
