This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: "The Traitors" has become essential viewing for millions of fans. The TV game show, in which a group of "faithfuls" try to identify a smaller number of hidden traitors, is all about truth and lies.
And it looks very easy from the sofa. For the 2026 celebrity version, contestants including singer James Blunt, mathematician Hannah Fry, broadcaster Amol Rajan and actors Bella Ramsey and Richard E. Grant will have been working on their game plans.
But inside the castle, things are more complicated than they might look. This is because the entire game is built in a way that makes any discussion among the contestants essentially useless. Economic theory suggests that for all of the players, talk is cheap.
Nothing they say is binding. Nothing they say can be checked. And if a contestant has any reason at all to deceive the person they're speaking to, their words simply cannot be relied upon.
That does not mean the traitors say nothing when they are holding forth at the roundtable discussion, for example. It just means that everything they say is also something a faithful might say. Traitors can ask a clever question, float a theory, look uneasy, defend themselves with feeling.
A faithful member of the group can do exactly the same things. So listening to what anyone says is essentially futile. Research has also shown that spotting liars is much more difficult than we might think.
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