Four episodes into The Traitors: New Blood, NBC's first all-civilian season of its hit competition series, the show has eliminated five contestants. Three of them, Kim Daily, Xavier Scruggs, and Arisa Thomas, were people of color, despite people of color making up just seven of the 22 contestants in the cast, about a third of the field. If you have watched any previous season of The Traitors, this will not surprise you, although it should bother you.
The premise of the show is simple. A group of strangers compete for a shared prize while a secretly appointed minority, the Traitors, try to eliminate the rest, the Faithful, without getting caught. Every night, the Faithful vote someone out based on hunches and suspicion: a pause before an answer, a look that seemed off, a tone that felt wrong.
It is a game engineered to isolate one thing: the raw judgment people make about who to trust when they have no real evidence to go on. That is also what makes it an unusually honest experiment. Every vote is documented, recorded, and broadcast.
Across the franchise's American and British civilian seasons, a pattern emerged before New Blood ever aired. Black and other non-white contestants have been about 59 percent more likely than white contestants to be voted out first, and women have been about 72 percent more likely to be banished first and twice as likely to be murdered by the Traitors outright. Of every Black contestant who has played a civilian season, exactly one has won, and she won by playing as a Traitor rather than by earning the Faithful's trust.
None of this happens because anyone on the show intends it to. Nobody sits down at the Round Table and decides to vote along racial lines. That is precisely the point, and precisely why it should be a cause for more concern and not less.
Implicit bias does not announce itself. It hides inside the very feeling people trust most, the sense that they just know who seems suspicious. Decades of social psychology research expose the same instinct at work far from any reality show production in who gets called back for a job interview, which defendant a jury finds credible, and whose pain a doctor takes seriously.
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