The “The Traitors” reality show: Are the contestants smarter than a coin toss?

I checked every round tabe vote so you don’t have to.

Are the players in “The Traitors” actually better than a coin toss? I went through every council vote, in every season, and checked it the only way that makes sense: episode by episode, chance by chance, and finally with Bayes to sort luck from skill.

The short answer? The show tells one story. The numbers tell another.

The BBC (UK), RTL 4 (The Netherlands), TV 2 (Norway) present “The Traitors” (In Norwegian: Forræder, in Dutch: De Verraders) as

A social game where people skills, psychological insight and sharp intuition are supposed to reveal the traitors hiding among the contestants.

The format is originally Dutch, but my analysis focuses on the Norwegian version — partly because it now has the most seasons and therefore the richest dataset.

I became curious about one simple question:

Are they actually any better than random guessing?

Spoiler: they’re not.

We know this from personnel selection: people are terrible at identifying the best candidate from a pool without using structured tools — yet they remain very confident that they’re good at it.

We know this from hiring: people are lousy at figuring out who the best applicant is when they don’t use structured tools — but they’re still convinced they’re great judges of character.

As the episodes go on, everybody takes part in different challenges and gets to know each other. The faithful are trying to identify the traitors, and most of what they have to go on is gut feeling. Some challenges can tilt things a bit toward one side or the other, and in theory that should help reveal who the traitors are.

The contestants are celebrities — people who make their living by reading others. The traitors do their best to look loyal and coordinate their plans. So the faithful have a tough job, but not tougher than in any normal situation where you’re trying to tell whether someone is who they say they are.

They’re basically on the same level as recruiters: not very good at spotting the right person, yet completely sure that their intuition counts for something.

After five seasons, we can compare their choices with the answer key: they keep their rock-solid faith in intuition, even though it clearly doesn’t work.

Here’s what it looks like from season to season: