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183 | FIVE LESSONS ABOUT LIFE AND TRUST WE CAN LEARN FROM THE TRAITORS

  • 2 minutes ago
  • 10 min read

THIS EPISODE IS SPONSORED BY

Fraser Coull of Silly Wee Films

The trust of the innocent is the liar’s most useful tool. Stephen King.

In the last two episodes, my two-part series on The Intelligence Trap, I was looking at why capable, intelligent people so often struggle to make progress. Not through lack of effort, but because intelligence can work against us when it isn’t properly directed. I talked about mental energy getting drained, attention fracturing, and good intentions collapsing without structure. If that sounds familiar and you haven’t heard those episodes yet, I’d recommend going back and listening.


- and today doesn’t move away from that problem. It approaches it from a different angle, by looking at how people actually behave when the pressure is real.


I’ve been watching The Traitors for a few years now and I love it, but what struck me almost immediately was that in many ways it plays out as a microcosm of society. That the exclusive knowledge of a small group of people can influence the masses and turn many of us into Useful idiots if we are not careful. I have done a show about useful idiots, it’s the one with Laurel and Hardy on the promotional image but it defines someone who unknowingly promotes or supports a cause, ideology, or agenda that ultimately works against their own interests - often while believing they're doing good or being progressive. They're "useful" to those manipulating the situation, and an "idiot" for not seeing they're being used.


Sadly, I feel that the world nowadays is filled to the brim with these people, but perhaps by listening to todays show you will be able to avoid that particular moniker.


For anyone who hasn’t seen it, the setup of The Traitors is simple. A group of people are brought together and isolated in a castle and told that a small number among them are secretly traitors, while the rest are faithful. The traitors know who each other are. The faithful don’t.


The job of the group is to work out who can be trusted, who can’t, and to eliminate the traitors before they’re taken out themselves. There’s a UK version and a US version that I have seen but there are more – the US one is hosted by Alan Cumming, who I’ve worked with recently – but the format isn’t really the point and the UK one by Claudia Winkleman.


What fascinates me isn’t the game, it’s the behaviour it produces. Because, as I say it feels to me like it’s a perfect microcosm of the world we actually live in. A very small number of people hold information, and because of that, they’re able to shape beliefs, steer decisions, and manipulate the environment around them with remarkable ease.

I’ve seen similar dynamics play out in day-to-day life, in creative interactions and in meetings where the stakes are high and information is limited as well as on the world stage.


One you understand it you start noticing it elsewhere. People aligning with confidence rather than truth. People mistaking noise for contribution. Scale that up slightly and you see it in the press, in government, and in how countries interact with one another.

The Traitors is terrific entertainment but it also strips away politeness and exposes how quickly trust forms, how easily it’s manipulated, and how badly decision-making degrades when people don’t really understand what’s happening in the room.


This isn’t an episode about how to win a TV show. It’s about what The Traitors reveals about real life, about work, about collaboration, and about why productivity sometimes collapses in groups even when everyone involved is capable. If you misunderstand human behaviour, you can burn enormous amounts of energy fighting it instead of working with it.


So, here I have distilled 5 lessons from the show, after some consideration - as there were many more, that I feel would be useful in the context of productivity, in understanding behaviours and in understanding ourselves.


The first is this: THOSE WITH INFORMATION SHAPE THE BELIEFS OF THE MAJORITY.


One of the clearest patterns in The Traitors is that the most dangerous people are rarely the loudest. They’re the ones who control information, or appear closest to it. Once someone frames the story early, the group follows, not because it’s accurate, but because uncertainty is uncomfortable.


Many people don’t think independently under pressure, they borrow certainty from whoever sounds confident first.


You may have experienced it in a meeting where one person speaks early and confidently about what the problem is. Nobody challenges it and nobody checks whether it’s correct. From that moment on, every conversation and action builds around that version of reality.


If you don’t know who controls the information in a situation, it probably isn’t you.

The productivity impact is that you waste energy reacting instead of directing. Another issue is one I’ve raised before in my show The Fcukwit Factor - sometimes those with loud voices know nothing at all - so beware of that.

The one who controls the narrative controls the group. Marshall McLuhan

The second item of note is that CONFIRMATION BIAS LOCKS BAD BELIEFS IN PLACE.

Confirmation bias is the idea that once you believe something, and are confident you have a good understanding of the right and wrong of it, that your brain starts looking for reasons to prove you’re right, and ignores anything that suggests you might be wrong.


You notice the evidence that supports your view, and you unconsciously perhaps discount or explain away the evidence that doesn’t, and you feel logical while doing it. It isn’t lying to yourself on purpose, it’s your brain trying to save effort and avoid the discomfort of changing its mind.


Once a belief takes hold in The Traitors, everything that follows gets filtered through it. Evidence that supports the belief is noticed, evidence that contradicts it is dismissed. That’s confirmation bias, and it’s devastating. People don’t update their beliefs, they defend them.


Imagine a group of students say, who decide early on that one person in their class can’t be trusted, but there’s no proof. It’s just a feeling that takes hold, perhaps originating from a popular person who doesn’t get along with the first. From that moment on, everything that person does gets filtered through that belief. If they speak up in class, they’re seen as defensive or trying too hard. If they stay quiet, it’s suspicious - clearly they’re hiding something.


Meanwhile, other students can behave in exactly the same way and it barely gets noticed. This isn’t stupidity. It’s how human brains conserve effort. Once a story is in place, the mind stops reassessing and starts sorting. The real-life lesson is that being smart doesn’t protect you from bias - it often makes you better at justifying it. The productivity impact is that teams burn huge amounts of energy proving themselves right, instead of getting things right.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. Aristotle

The third thing I have noticed is that UNCERTAINTY CREATES BAD CONSENSUS.


Watch what happens at the round table. Uncertainty doesn’t slow decisions down; it speeds bad ones up. People don’t want truth, they want relief from not knowing, so confidence and repetition beat accuracy almost every time.


A simple example is a group that can’t agree on what to do. Nobody has enough information, nobody feels confident, and the discussion starts to drag. Eventually someone suggests a course of action, not because it’s clearly the right one, but because it’s something. The room relaxes, people nod along, and the decision gets made. Not because it’s good, but because it ends the uncertainty.


The real-life lesson is that groups often choose certainty over accuracy.

The productivity impact from that however is that decisions get made to reduce tension, not to solve the problem.

Where there is fear, there is haste. Seneca

There's also that oft quoted one I use her by Peter Drucker - that there is nothing so useless as doing efficiently, that which should not be done at all.


My fourth point is that EMOTIONAL CONTROL DETERMINES WHO IS TRUSTED. 


In The Traitors, people who over-explain, get defensive, or react emotionally attract suspicion, even when they’re innocent. Calm behaviour reads as credibility. 


This is uncomfortable, but it’s consistent. People don’t judge reliability by how right you are, they judge it by how you behave under pressure.


Imagine two people making the same point. One stays calm. The other gets visibly frustrated. The calm one is taken seriously. The frustrated one is ignored.


Nothing about the argument itself has changed, but the reaction to it has. The real-life lesson is that people read emotional control as reliability.


As someone who can get frustrated over time till the point where I have no other calm options left, when talking to someone who is actively stonewalling me for example, and eventually lose the rag - I understand this one well.

He who conquers himself is the mightiest warrior. Confucius

My fifth lesson from watching the show is that SHORT-TERM SAFETY DESTROYS LONG-TERM TRUST.


Many players in The Traitors make decisions simply to survive the day. They avoid hard conversations, back weak arguments, and align with the wrong people to stay comfortable, but eventually, those shortcuts catch up with them.


A real-world example of this one is someone knowing a decision isn’t right, but staying quiet to avoid bother, or for an easy life. They go along with it. Nothing blows up immediately, so it feels like the safe option. But over time, that pattern becomes visible.


They’re trusted a little less, listened to a little less, and eventually sidelined. Not because of one big mistake, but because of repeated avoidance.


Simply put, protecting our own comfort in the moment slowly erodes trust. This is the conflict-avoider archetype - the person who values short-term peace over long-term clarity.


They tell themselves they’re being reasonable, diplomatic, or keeping things moving, but what they’re really doing is deferring responsibility. The productivity impact is that avoided decisions don’t disappear. They stack up quietly, and they come back later with interest, usually at a much higher cost than if they’d been dealt with properly in the first place.

What is avoided is rarely escaped. Baltasar Gracián.

The Traitors works because it strips away politeness and exposes behaviour under pressure. And once you see these patterns clearly, you stop wasting energy expecting people, teams, or systems to behave better than they actually do.


What struck me, looking at all five of these things together, is that none of them are really about intelligence. They’re about where attention goes when pressure is on.

Productivity doesn’t usually collapse because people are lazy or incapable. It collapses because attention gets pulled toward confidence instead of truth, comfort instead of clarity, certainty instead of accuracy, and emotion instead of judgement.


Once that happens, very capable people start making very bad decisions: calmly, confidently, and together.


If you apply this to your own work and career, the question becomes much simpler: where are you outsourcing your thinking?


Are you accepting the first narrative in the room because it sounds certain? Defending a belief because you’ve already invested in it? Agreeing to decisions just to end the discomfort of not knowing? Losing influence because frustration leaks into your behaviour? Or choosing short-term peace at the cost of long-term trust?


None of that makes you weak. It makes you human. But it does make you predictable, and predictability is expensive.


The real productivity gain isn’t working harder or being smarter. It’s learning to pause before you align.


To slow down just enough to ask:


  1. Who actually has the information here?

  2. What am I assuming without checking?

  3. Am I choosing certainty or accuracy?

  4. Am I reacting, or am I in control?

  5. And what am I avoiding today that I’ll pay for later?


If you can hold that pause, even briefly, you stop playing other people’s games and start directing your own energy again.


That’s where trust begins. That’s where real productivity comes from. And that’s how you stop becoming useful to the wrong causes, and start being effective in the right ones.


These are just 5 lessons that I have picked up whilst enjoying the show. Once you see these patterns though and recognise them for what they are, you will stop wasting energy expecting people, or systems, to behave differently.


And start noticing the same five things over and over again:


·       THOSE WITH INFORMATION SHAPE THE BELIEFS OF THE MAJORITY

·       CONFIRMATION BIAS LOCKS BAD BELIEFS IN PLACE

·       UNCERTAINTY CREATES BAD CONSENSUS

·       EMOTIONAL CONTROL DETERMINES WHO IS TRUSTED

·       SHORT-TERM SAFETY DESTROYS LONG-TERM TRUST


And that shift alone will free up your focus.


CALL TO ACTION


Keep an awareness of the five lessons from this episode and see if you can recognise any of them playing out around you. You might notice them in your own work, in group situations, or even in the world news. Watch who controls the information, how stories get framed, which beliefs get defended and how your beliefs are strengthened by confirmation bias, how quickly uncertainty turns into agreement, and how people behave under pressure. Simply noticing those patterns is often enough to change how much energy you waste reacting to them.


Next time, I’ll be building on this with a very practical idea that helps you stop carrying unfinished business around in your head, and start freeing up mental energy deliberately. That’s 184 UNFINISHED BUSINESS - WHY NOT FINISHING THINGS IS COSTING YOU MORE THAN YOU THINK.


Thanks again for listening, and I di hope you have gotten something valuable from this episode. Do yourself a favour and go watch a series of The Traitors, because even if you don’t like reality television, I’ve a feeling you’ll like this one


Let’s end today with a piece of advice that anyone taking part on the Traitors should consider carefully – and we should all be aware of in life –

It’s from Jean-Luc Picard, Captain of the USS Enterprise NCC 1701-D, who said, It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.

Now, take control of your own destiny. Keep on shootin’ and join me next time on FILM PRO PRODUCTIVITY!

FIVE LESSONS ABOUT LIFE AND TRUST WE CAN LEARN FROM THE TRAITORS

THIS EPISODE IS SPONSORED BY


Fraser Coull of Silly Wee Films


REFERENCES

The Traitors (UK & US)

Information asymmetry

Confirmation bias

Group decision-making under uncertainty

Emotional regulation and perceived credibility

Short-term safety vs long-term trust


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© 2018 Carter Ferguson - Film Pro Productivity

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