Spoiler alert: if you haven’t yet watched episodes 1-6 of The Traitors UK but you plan to do so, don’t read on
I didn’t watch the first series of The Traitors (I’m not generally a fan of reality shows where people compete for money), but the buzz it generated made me curious enough to start watching the second, which the BBC is showing this month. It’s now reached the halfway mark, and I’m still watching. If you’re interested, as I am, in the way people talk–and more specifically in how gender affects group interaction–this show offers plenty of food for thought.
In case anyone’s unfamiliar with the format, here’s a quick rundown. Twenty two players are gathered in a Scottish castle and sent on “missions” where they work in teams to earn the prize money they’re hoping to win. A small number of them have been secretly assigned the role of Traitors, and if any of them make it to the end they’ll take all the money, leaving the non-Traitors (“Faithfuls”) with nothing. By that point most players will have been eliminated: the Traitors murder one Faithful each night, meeting in secret to choose their victim, and there’s also a daily Round Table meeting at which the whole group banish someone they think is a Traitor (or in the case of the actual Traitors, someone they want the others to think is a Traitor). This process starts with an unstructured group discussion, and ends with each person casting a vote: whoever gets the most votes must leave, revealing their true allegiance (Traitor or Faithful) on their way out.
Verbal communication plays a central role in this game: to succeed, players need both the ability to read people (paying close attention to their actions, demeanour and–crucially–their speech) and the ability to speak persuasively in a group (since decisions require majority agreement). Individuals will vary in how they approach these tasks and how skilfully they perform them, which is partly a question of experience and temperament. But what happens in group talk isn’t just about individuals: it’s also affected by social factors.
Gender is one of those factors. A large body of research on interaction in mixed groups tells us that
- women typically get less talking time than men: they speak up less, get called on less, and are interrupted or talked over more.
- women who talk as much and as forcefully as men tend to be more negatively evaluated than either men or less talkative women: both sexes may regard them as pushy and “abrasive”
- women’s contributions to a group discussion have less influence than men’s on the group’s decisions.
These patterns, which put women at an obvious disadvantage, have been found in a range of settings, including school and college classrooms, workplace meetings and small group deliberative discussions. Are they also in evidence on The Traitors?
Let’s start with the question of who’s getting most airtime. In a group of this size you’d expect to see variation–some people talking a lot and others saying little or nothing–but while I haven’t been through each Round Table discussion with a stopwatch, I think it’s clear that the least vocal participants have been predominantly women (e.g., Evie, Meg, Mollie, Tracey). At the other end of the spectrum, the pattern is less clear-cut. The players who’ve spoken frequently, at length, and in decisive or challenging ways, have included both men (e.g., Ant, Zack) and women (e.g., Kyra, Ash and Diane). That raises the question of how these more dominant speakers’ contributions have been received. Have assertive women, as research might predict, paid a higher price than men for speaking out?
Diane emerged early on as one of the most confident and forceful speakers, but she quickly came under suspicion (she was one of three candidates for banishment in a tense split vote during the first week), and after narrowly escaping elimination she became more cautious about how often and how decisively she intervened. But the Traitors continued to regard her as a threat. In episode 5 she was on their shortlist for murder, and in episode 6 she became their target (though at the time of writing we don’t know if they succeeded in eliminating her—this has been left as the second week’s cliffhanger).
They had already murdered Kyra, following an early Round Table where she was widely judged to have been one of the most influential voices in the room. Unlike Diane, Kyra was not suspected of treachery: what sealed her fate was the Traitors’ concern about her evident ability to sway the group.
Ash is a slightly different case: she was, in fact, a Traitor (the only woman assigned that role), and it didn’t take long for the group to become suspicious of her, mainly because they thought she talked too much; her eagerness to find out what other players were thinking via informal chats in smaller groups was interpreted as “stirring”. Once the others began to mobilize against her, her fellow-Traitors, not unreasonably, concluded that she was a liability and supported the group’s decision to banish her.
But it’s not just outspoken women who’ve been targeted: some of the quiet ones (e.g., Sonja, Meg and Tracey) have also been eliminated. In the second week four players were condemned by the Traitors to spend the day in a dungeon; the others were told that the next murder victim would be selected from this group, but whoever won that day’s mission could choose one of them to save. Among the Faithfuls there was general agreement that the condemned four probably included at least one and possibly two Traitors, who’d consigned themselves to the dungeon in a bid to misdirect the group. This theory was correct: the condemned group included two Traitors, Ash and Paul, along with two Faithfuls, Meg and Andrew. But most players assumed the men were both good guys, and that the Traitors must therefore be the women.
In Ash’s case this made sense, since her allegedly excessive talking had already aroused suspicion. In Meg’s case, however, what people claimed to find suspicious was the opposite, how little she talked. Her reserved demeanour and near-silence in group discussions became a sign of her duplicity. The inconsistency of the group’s reasoning was a good illustration of the classic double-bind whereby women can be criticized whatever they do or don’t do. If they don’t speak out they’re judged as weak and “lacking authority”, but if they do they’re accused of being aggressive and overbearing.
After the mission-winning team chose to save Andrew, and the whole group then voted to banish Ash, the remaining Traitors had no option but to murder Meg, thus revealing that she was not, in fact, a Traitor. It’s possible they would have chosen Andrew if he hadn’t been protected. But as a number of people pointed out on social media, once Ash had departed it began to look as if they were deliberately going after female players. On their first night as an all-male group they drew up a shortlist of three women (Charlotte, Diane and Tracey), and ultimately chose to murder Tracey. It was unclear why: like Meg, Tracey tended to listen rather than speak, and despite her claim to have psychic powers, which she herself held responsible for the Traitors’ decision to kill her, she obviously had no idea who they were.
On the following day the Traitors targeted Diane, whose outspokenness made her, arguably, a more logical choice than Tracey. But their general preference for female victims (so far they’ve selected four women and one man) does not seem entirely logical, given that the only people who’ve shown any sign of suspecting them are men. While two of these men (Brian and Ant) have now been banished, three others (Jaz, Ross and Zack) remain. Jaz has aired suspicions about Paul at two Round Tables so far, and has voted to banish him once. The others haven’t voted against him, but they’ve all at least hinted they suspect him.
Paul’s survival speaks to a feature of the game that is not directly related to gender: the way discussions have been affected by groupthink. Most players have been markedly reluctant to diverge from what they take to be the prevailing view, and one view which has thus far prevailed is that Paul, identified in an early poll as the most popular group-member, cannot possibly be a Traitor. That conviction should not have survived the revelation that Meg was a Faithful: after she was killed and Ash was unmasked, suspicion should logically have fallen on both Andrew and Paul. But at that day’s Round Table neither received any votes. A far less obvious proposal garnered more and more support as the discussion went on: its subject, Jonny, ended up with 12 votes against him out of a possible 17. On the following day Andrew did receive two votes, but Paul received none. Jaz expressed suspicion about him, but ultimately voted for Andrew (Paul, meanwhile, voted for Jaz: it remains to be seen whether anyone has picked up on the significance of this). Though the vote was less decisive than it had been the day before, half the players chose Ant, who was duly banished.
After learning that they’d eliminated yet another Faithful, some group-members did start to ask if they were giving too much weight to their feelings about other people, and too little to less subjective kinds of evidence. Though the short answer to that question is yes, I’d say the deeper problem is their unwillingness, in most cases, to interrogate either established preconceptions (e.g., that Paul is not a traitor) or the arguments which are made in group discussions (e.g., that there was a dramatic change in Ant’s behaviour after the first night). Many Round Table discussions have reminded me of the famous 1950s “conformity experiment” where the psychologist Solomon Asch found that most people who heard a series of others giving the wrong answer to a question (these others were in fact confederates who’d been instructed to answer wrongly) reproduced the same answer, despite knowing it was wrong. The format of the game relies on people’s tendency to want to fit in with whatever group they’re part of: if players were less prone to following the herd the daily banishment votes would often fail to produce a clear loser. So far, that’s only happened once: most votes—three out of five—have been landslides.
In the game as in real life (where people who witness bullying and harassment often don’t intervene, even though they disapprove), players who do dissent from the majority view may feel that challenging it openly is too dangerous. Jaz, for instance, has twice voiced his suspicions about Paul in group discussion, but he has avoided pressing the point too strongly, and has not consistently voted to banish Paul. Presumably he reasons that if he can’t persuade a majority of the others to support him—an uphill task, given that so many players think Paul can do no wrong—he will just be making himself a target. If he did become the Traitors’ next victim that might point the remaining Faithfuls in the right direction, but from his perspective it would be a bad outcome–it would mean he was out of the game–so it’s rational for him to minimize the risk.
I said earlier that this aspect of the group dynamic wasn’t directly related to gender, but it’s unlikely to be a coincidence that the player who attracts most loyalty, respect and admiration from other players of both sexes is a man rather than a woman. Mixed groups of all kinds are more likely to view men as the outstanding performers and most qualified leaders. And Paul is the kind of man who often gets propelled to the top of the pecking-order: a white manager in his mid-30s (old enough to have some gravitas but not too old to be considered dynamic), he’s confident, well-groomed and physically attractive by mainstream standards. Though departing players, amazed to be told that he’s a Traitor, have commented that he’s “playing a blinder”, it might be more a case of the others playing a blinder for him—projecting onto him the positive qualities they associate with men of his type, whether or not he’s done anything concrete to demonstrate those qualities. At the moment his position seems fairly secure: though a couple of the players do suspect him, the women, in particular, are still behind him.
Was it a mistake for the Traitors to kill off women who gave no sign of suspecting them, like Meg and Tracey—and even Diane, who was more suspicious of Ant and Andrew—while leaving men who did have suspicions in play? Possibly; it’s also possible that what motivated them was, as some social media commenters thought, just basic sexism. On that point I’m currently agnostic, but if they go on murdering women I’ll change my mind, because at this stage it’s not a rational strategy. If I were Paul I’d want to protect my loyal female supporters and concentrate on removing actual threats. I’d resist the temptation to murder Jaz immediately, while making every effort to turn the group against him; I’d probably aim to pick off Zack and Andrew first (since both have already attracted suspicion) and I wouldn’t try to squash the doubts some people are now having about my fellow-Traitor Miles. If Ross survives he’d be next on my list.
What about the remaining women? Almost all of them are less vocal and/or less challenging than Jaz, Zack or Ross. Evie and Mollie are virtually silent; Charlie and Charlotte are a bit more assertive, but not consistently enough to be influential. In a way this has worked to their advantage, by keeping them off the other players’ radar; if any of these four last long enough they could be part of a winning group (though only, of course, if all the Traitors have been unmasked). Jasmine, by contrast, jumps in more readily and is capable of being challenging,. But she doesn’t seem likely to rock the boat. For one thing she’s one of Paul’s staunchest supporters, and for another she hasn’t been great at winning the other Faithfuls’ trust. Her keenness to claim the shields which protect individuals from the next night’s murder has led to a perception of her as self-centred, not a team-player. If the Traitors are derailed, it may happen with the women’s support (apart from Charlie they all have an unbroken record of voting with the majority), but I doubt whether any of them will take the lead.
I’m not suggesting that women (or anyone else who isn’t a straight white middle-class man) can’t win. In the first series of The Traitors two of the three winners were women. But there are probably fewer ways for them to do it, because so many strategies are less socially acceptable and more negatively stereotyped in women. The belief that women are or should be kinder than men and more attuned to others’ feelings makes people less tolerant and more suspicious when women like Jasmine behave selfishly (though in a competition you’d expect all players to put their own interests first) or when they are strongly critical of others (what’s seen as forthright in men becomes bitchy in women). Women whose contributions command attention in a group are also more readily seen, like Kyra, as potential threats.
Since in this series the Traitors were mostly—and are now exclusively—male, I do think it’s possible that both gender stereotyping and the dynamics of mixed-sex interaction have played some part in protecting them. But so has capricious decision-making. If The Traitors shows anything, it shows that most of us are much less good than we think we are at reading other people. It’s not that the producers have recruited a particularly dense set of contestants: the audience-members who’ve taken to Twitter to complain that they’re obtuse and stupid seem to be forgetting that as viewers they already know who the Traitors are, making it easy to read their behaviour as treacherous. Lacking that information, the Faithfuls have relied on “gut feelings”–a phrase which suggests they’re accessing some deep-rooted, instinctive wisdom, when in fact what they’re accessing is a collection of prejudices, stereotypes and normative expectations which lead, as we’ve seen, to illogical and inconsistent judgments.
Would the Faithfuls do better if they were more aware of their biases and made a more conscious effort to resist stereotyping and groupthink? Maybe; but it isn’t easy for any group, let alone a group whose members barely know each other and who are operating in an unfamiliar environment, to detect the traitors in their midst. If liars and dissemblers were so easy to spot, the quest to unmask them wouldn’t fill 12 episodes–and the world would be a lot less full of successful spies, fraudsters, con-artists and people like Jaz’s father (who turned out to have a second family). Our need to trust other people, and be accepted by them, makes all of us vulnerable to deception and betrayal. The Traitors exploits that: it may be light entertainment, but underneath the kitsch exterior its heart is dark.
language: a feminist guide 