Alan Cumming, host of the hit American version of the reality competition the traitors, has a theory about what makes the show so compelling: “We watch people lie and we know they’re lying,” he said in a recent interview on NBC’s Today. “And also, you look at people who handle lying badly and don’t like it.”
The traitors brings a group of celebrity contestants – actors, comedians, reality TV stars and Olympic athletes, for example – to a mansion in the bucolic Scottish Highlands to play a high-stakes version of the party game Mafia. The prize is a jackpot worth up to $250,000. The goal of the game is for the “faithful” to identify and banish the “traitors”, while the traitors try to trick everyone else into thinking they are one of the good guys.
The lying, backstabbing and manipulation the game inspires really makes for great TV viewing. But the show’s formula also raises a question: How do you win? The answer may lie in what science tells us about how and why we lie and how we know when someone is playing tricks on us.
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Plays like a stalwart
For those who play The traitors as a faithful, a winning strategy lies in being able to tell who is lying and who is not. Unfortunately, humans are exceptionally bad at spotting lies. A 2006 meta-analysis involving more than 24,000 people, for example, found that participants correctly identified lies only 47 percent of the time—about the same as they could by simply flipping a coin—and correctly identified truths only 61 percent of the time.
To catch a traitor in the act, players must consider their own innate biases, says Geoffrey Beattie, professor of psychology at Edge Hill University in England and author of the book Lies, lies and liars: A psychological analysis. “And there are a lot of them,” Beattie adds.
One such bias is that many of us are taught from a young age that if someone is lying, they won’t look you in the eye. “That’s simply not true,” says Beattie. On the contrary, when people are planning what to say next, they tend to look away, while liars are often known to maintain eye contact to avoid detection. “Then forget the moment,” says Beattie.
Other body language can be more telling. When they smile, how soon do they stop laughing? An extremely abrupt stop on a smile signals that it may be fake, says Beattie. Research also shows that people who lie often suppress their hand movements and may even blink differently than when they are telling the truth.
Part of the reason liars try to control their body language may be because playing fake requires more cognitive effort, says Sharon Leal, a senior researcher at the University of Portsmouth in England who studies deception. “It takes more mental resources to lie than it does to tell the truth,” she says. A similar situation occurs when we unknowingly stop dead in the street to, for example, respond to a text message, adds Leal.
There is a way to exploit this tendency called “cognitive interviewing.” For the faithful Traitors players, Beattie recommends asking other participants about their experiences out of chronological order. It makes it more difficult to lie convincingly and consistently compared to telling a single rehearsed story. Research Leal and her colleagues published in 2008 found that police officers were better at spotting lies about an incident when false “suspects” told false details in reverse chronological order.
Confirmation bias can also muddy the waters. “If you like someone and they share your views,” says Beattie, “you’re less likely to be skeptical when they start talking, because they’re saying things you want to hear.” In the same way, people who are thought of as good-looking can benefit from a so-called halo effect: Some research suggests that defendants in criminal cases are more likely to receive a lighter sentence if they are perceived as physically attractive, says Beattie.
Leal recommends focusing on verbal information – such as conflicting storytelling or word choice. In a 2025 study, she and her colleagues found that people tend to be better at spotting lies when they hear someone make a statement rather than seeing it.
“I would completely ignore nonverbal behavior,” says Leal, “unless it was something really obvious.”
Plays as a traitor
For the traitors in the game, science has a few tricks they can try to be more convincing. Coming across as open, friendly and welcoming comes across as more trustworthy, says Leal. “You might throw in something about your personal life” in a conversation, for example to give the impression of openness.
Another strategy is to “emotionally reframe stories,” says Beattie. “The secret to being a really good liar is to change the emotional response to (lying).” If you can remind yourself that you are playing a game with your fellow participants that you want to win, you can avoid triggering more emotional – and thus narrative – responses to questions, he says.
Ultimately, lying can be burdensome. In this season, a traitor, Love the islandRob Rausch, revealed in the pre-finale episode that his deception had “taken a toll.”
“It’s kind of like holding a glass of water: At first, it doesn’t bother you,” says Leal. “But keep at it for hours and hours and hours and you’ll start to feel the stress of it.”
Viewers will have to wait until the show’s finale airs on Thursday to find out if Rausch’s efforts will pay off — or if he’ll walk away with nothing. But his strategy of keeping his emotions in check, leaning into alliances and wearing overalls without a shirt seems to be going well so far. As host Cumming shared in a recent episode of Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen“is the name of the game The traitorsand he is very good at it.”
