The BBC’s Traitors isn’t just a reality game show - it’s a psychological experiment dressed up in cloaks. As contestants scramble to form alliances, spot Traitors, and survive banishments, their biases take centre stage. From snap judgments to ingrained stereotypes, the show exposes how easily we fall into mental traps when the pressure is on.
What makes Traitors fascinating and painful to watch is how the contestants mirror the biases we see in everyday life. We see contestants trusting the familiar, dismissing the different, and making decisions shaped by identity, emotion, and fear. In this post, I’m breaking down the biases at play and how they shape both the game and our understanding of human behavior.
Spoiler alert: this blog post contains spoilers from episodes 1-9 of Season 3 of the UK Traitors. It has been published before the final three episodes, and there are no spoilers from the finale.