Tgoy-two people in a castle, Claudia Winkleman whooping it up like crazy, a number of silly challenges, a wad of money sitting in the middle, almost glowing, and human nature laid bare. Trying to pick apart exactly what makes The Traitors to miss the point would be as compelling as trying to analyze the ingredients in a Krispy Kreme doughnut.
However, as fun as it is, the show gets more infuriating with each episode. I don’t want to point fingers, much less give spoilers, so let’s keep it broad: why are they (the Faithful) all so stupid? Why can’t they tell when they are being lied to? It is so obvious!
I asked three experts how to spot a lie – and why most people can’t. Firstly, Dr Linda Papadopoulos, a psychologist, author and broadcaster, who people of a certain vintage may remember as the standout discovery of the first season of Big Brother. Reality TV was in its infancy, so watching ordinary people interact under a microscope was fascinating in itself, but Papadopoulos, the show’s resident psychologist, added an almost superhuman level of insight into the contestants’ feelings; she was like a mind reader.
Second, Joe Navarro is the author of What Every Body Is Saying, insight into non-verbal cues and telling from his career as an FBI agent. Gabrielle Stewart, the third, is a retired insurance investigator who works as a fraud consultant for the industry.
This trio doesn’t always agree, but seriously, you wouldn’t want to lie to any of them. Here are their 10 tips for spotting a liar.
Look out for self-soothing gestures
“The problem with the deception detection myth is that since the groundbreaking work of Paul Ekman [a psychologist whose visual test, Pictures of Facial Affect, was published in 1976] and all the researchers who came after him, we know that people are nothing better than chance to detect deception,” says Navarro.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t read anything in people’s expressions and behavior. “What the human body does—and it does a great job—is display psychological discomfort in real time,” he says. “King Charles – he’s always playing with his cufflinks. This is how he deals with social anxiety. Prince Harry – he always ties the button that is already tied – another comforting behaviour.”
Face touching is known as a pacifier – a way to calm yourself down under stress. “Right now you’re covering your top notch,” Navarro says as our video call begins. To protect my neck, in other words, “what is because there is a man right in front of you”. It drives me crazy because I love men. But he’s right in that I’ve always felt the danger of the first few seconds of an interview – if you make a mess of it, the whole thing is ruined. So, there is the first principle: everything someone does with their hands and their face says something. Now, you have to figure out what.
Examine areas where you detect psychological discomfort
Navarro recalls a manhunt for a fugitive during his FBI days. In an interview with the man’s mother, he asked if she had seen her son. She said no and was clearly nervous, but there was no way to connect the anxiety to the answer; she could have been telling the truth and simply been upset by the appearance of two FBI agents on her doorstep.
He changed course and asked if it was possible that her son had snuck into the house while she was at work. “She said, ‘No, that’s not possible at all,'” with a nervous message — covering her neck, in this case. “But there was no reason for that, right? All she had to say was, ‘I don’t know.’” So the non-verbal display of nerves combined with the illogical answer hinted at deception. Sure enough, the man was in the house.
Don’t take obvious gestures at face value
Some poignant non-verbal narratives are rooted in archaic human self-preservation. We cover our mouths when we see something shocking or horrible because “it prevents us from smelling, which predators can pick up,” says Navarro.
The problem is that the clearer the gesture, the easier it is to plan and imitate. So, every time they vote out an innocent player on The Traitors, all the Loyalists cover their mouths in horror, but so do the Traitors. Large, fixed events, where everyone makes the same face or gestures, probably won’t tell you much.
Look for mismatch
Papadopoulos picks up the space between the non-verbal and the verbal – the contradiction between words and gestures: “You nod, but say no.” Stewart listens for acoustic variance in speech, where pitch and tone change. Lying people will fill a story with elements of truth, which is probably smart, except that when they get to the falsehoods, “they speed up and talk at a higher pitch,” says Stewart. “The voice says, ‘I’m in cognitive overload.'”
Learn to receive, not transmit
“The ability to actively listen, which psychologists do, is surprisingly rare. Many people think about what they are going to say next, rather than listening,” says Papadopoulos. We also forget how much of ourselves we bring to the interaction; if we are stressed or anxious, it is harder to detect or decode stress in others.
Papadopoulos describes how she fell for a scam when she was in the middle of a family crisis: “I write about these things – I know my stuff – but at that moment I was scammed. If I was on my game it would have been much less likely. This is the whole basis of psychology: we think through our emotions and this moderates the quality of our thinking.”
Don’t ignore the impact your tone has on the conversation (memo to The Traitors’ Diane): “If you come across as accusatory, it affects how people respond,” says Navarro. “I’ve never done that because it puts people on the defensive and it starts to hide behavior that I need to observe.” Don’t jump to conclusions either. Classic ways to spot a liar — like vagueness, or buying time, Papadopoulos says — can mean something entirely different. “It might just mean that they didn’t really listen,” she says. If you decide too quickly that you have uncovered deception, it rules out other possible explanations.
Let them tell their side of the story
Stewart, who did her insurance investigation work by phone, says: “The structure of the account is key. You wouldn’t necessarily do it in person when you talk to someone, but any story will have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It is usually 30% build-up, 40% content, 30% thoughts and reflections. A false account will not adhere to that structure because they don’t really want to tell you that 40%. The most common structure of a lie will be 80% build up, then they will tell you what happened really, really quickly, then they will want to get it over with.
“I would record an event with timelines and bullet points on landscape paper, and then draw a line where I believe I went from beginning to middle to end. Almost every fraudulent account will have a very long beginning, a funny middle, and a long end.
Memory blamers are a flag: when something significant happens, it is very unusual to forget it. Even if it was misremembered or misperceived, there won’t be a huge hole in the memory where that detail should be.
Listen for times and dissociation
“We use completely different language when we tell lies,” says Stewart. “A very famous example is President Nixon. He was asked bluntly, “Did you know about Watergate?” and his answer was, ‘The president will do no such thing.’
“First, he has dissociation, which is very common. In an untrue version, there is a lack of ‘I’ and ‘my’, because we want to push the lie away from ourselves. Then he slipped tensely.” For example, a sincere person whose car was stolen will say: “I left it here, came back an hour later and it was gone.” An untrue version might slip into the present continuous: “I’m walking down the path and I’m looking for my car, thinking…”
Be alert for strange sounds or random words
Stewart talks about “emotional leakage”. A liar might start laughing randomly, but it won’t sound like mirth. Time filling sounds are common. “It’s an added cognitive burden, to tell an untruth,” she says. “It’s like patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time. So, they will be on high alert and they cannot stand silence. You’ll hear coughs, or strings of words that don’t need to be said.” Associated with this is non-committal language, or “linguistic entrenchment” – words like “probably” and “possible”. “They are like disclaimers: ‘I don’t want to associate myself with this language.’
Ask character questions
In the 80s, my father, who was a prison psychologist, devised some recruitment tests for the police designed to determine whether candidates were honest. One of the advances was: “Are you married? Have you ever had a relationship? Have you ever thought about having a relationship?” If you answered yes to the first, it doesn’t matter what you said to the second, as long as you didn’t answer no to the third, because everyone’s thought about it. To apply this to The Traitors, one player might ask another, “Do you find Zack annoying?” If they say no, it doesn’t prove that they are a Traitor, but they are definitely the kind of person who lies.
Ask yourself: are you looking through the right side of the telescope?
Each of these cues – verbal, non-verbal and in between – relies on something: the liar’s discomfort. Not everyone will feel upset by cheating; some people will enjoy it. “We know that 1% of any given population — here in America it could be much more — are psychopaths,” says Navarro. “These people can lie all day. There are structures in their prefrontal cortex that just don’t function.” Added, “4% of the population is antisocial; these are people who live through criminal activities”, he says. Even if they are not born to deceive, they will be used to it.
Many people have to lie for their jobs. Navarro mentions spies and doctors, but makes the broader point that we all use lies “as a tool of social survival”. Some of us will inevitably be very good at it. But what are we trying to survive? We want to remain members of the group and we fear expulsion. In a culture where lying is highly valued – politics, The Traitors – the act of lying can make you come across as more confident, rather than less.
So, if you cross-reference the verbal and non-verbal cues, then reverse engineer the tests to get pretty good at identifying an honest nervous person, you can figure out who’s lying by a process of elimination; even if they were psychopathically good at it, it wouldn’t matter.
What will undo you in The Traitors – and in life – is making sure based on too little information or ambiguous evidence. “I looked at 261 DNA releases in the US,” says Navarro. “All the police officers thought they could detect deception, but none of them could detect the truth. In fact, neither man was guilty.”
