Inside a Traitor’s Brain

Why the Faithful keep getting it wrong

The Traitors is back, and once again Claudia Winkleman is prowling a candlelit room, tapping shoulders, and turning friends into foes. By breakfast, the chosen few are smiling, sympathising, and swearing on their lives that they’re Faithful. 

I got a taste of this at a Traitors-themed dinner party. I was desperate to be picked as a Traitor and sure I’d be good at it. Instead, it was exhausting: my heart was racing, I second-guessed every sentence, and I was the first one out. So why is lying such hard work? Why are some people better at it than others? And why are the Faithful so bad at catching Traitors? The answer starts in the brain. 

Telling the truth is simple: you retrieve a memory and say it. Lying, on the other hand, requires the brain to do several jobs at once. You have to suppress the truth, build a believable alternative, and check the story against everything you’ve already said. This is a lot of work, and it shows. Brain-imaging studies have found that the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s planning and self-control centre, works far harder during a lie. Meanwhile, the anterior cingulate cortex, a kind of internal conflict detector, flags the mismatch between what you know and what you’re saying. On top of all that, getting caught carries real social risk, so the amygdala kicks off a fight-or-flight response. Racing heart, dry mouth — exactly what the Traitors are trying to hide at the round table. 

So if lying is such a mental strain, why do Traitors seem to grow more confident and take bigger risks as the series goes on? A study at University College London (UCL) offers an explanation. The researchers found that participants’ first lies triggered a strong negative response in the amygdala, the brain’s ‘this feels wrong’ alarm. But with each lie that followed, this response faded: the brain was becoming desensitised to its own dishonesty, and the lies grew bigger. Getting away with lying also brings its own reward. When a lie avoids punishment or wins approval, the brain’s reward pathways release dopamine, reinforcing the behaviour. Less guilt, more reward, and dishonesty snowballs. 

This might explain why Traitors often look jittery in the first episode and seem brazen by the finale. Their brains may have quite literally adjusted to the job. It also may be why some are good liars: like any skill, the more it’s practised, the less effort it takes. 

If lying is so effortful, surely it should be easy to spot? Not really. Humans detect lies with around 54% accuracy, barely better than flipping a coin. Part of the problem is that we look for the wrong clues. Avoiding eye contact, fidgeting, and touching your face: these are the classic ‘tells,’ yet there’s little evidence that they reliably signal lying. 

We’re also wired to trust, so our default is to assume people are telling the truth. But once we’ve decided someone is guilty, confirmation bias takes over: we notice everything that fits and ignore everything that doesn’t. Once a Faithful is convinced someone is a Traitor, very little will change their mind.

To spot a Traitor, psychologists suggest we should listen more than we look. Lying already eats up mental resources, so liars tend to keep their stories short and simple. Asking unexpected questions, or asking someone to tell their story backwards, piles on an extra load that liars often struggle to handle.

Even then, no method is foolproof, which is perhaps the real lesson of The Traitors: your gut is far less trustworthy than you think. The Traitors may be carrying an enormous mental load, but the Faithful have no definite way to spot it. And if someone has been lying all series, they’re probably only getting better at it. 

Image from Wikimedia Commons