How to catch a traitor

A quarter of a century after the first series of Big Brother, there is still some life in reality TV. Most of it is dross, but reality TV at its best tells you something about the human condition. What The Traitors (BBC One) tells us is that people are very good at lying. We over-estimate our ability to read people, and ‘body language’ is as likely to mislead us as it is to provide a ‘tell’. It is because people are good at lying that the faithfuls spend most of their time banishing fellow faithfuls based on nothing but vibes. They are then filled with remorse before picking another target at random and doing exactly the same thing again.

The other thing The Traitors shows us is that people act in their rational self-interest and generally do it rather well. This is what the Russian social scientist Dimitry Davidoff would have been interested in when he invented the game Mafia in the 1980s.