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By Tyson-Lord Gray
Assistant Professor of Law at The University of Toledo College of Law
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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.
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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. The Traitors simply puts a camera on a decision that usually happens in private.
What is happening in the first episodes of New Blood is not a coincidence, and it is not proof on its own. Five eliminations is too small a number to carry a statistical claim by itself. What it is however, is a live preview of a pattern that has already repeated across eight prior seasons and two countries, playing out once again in real time, in front of a national audience. So far, people of color have accounted for 60 percent of eliminations while representing 32 percent of the cast.
The uncomfortable lesson is not that reality TV is broken. It is that the same instincts producing these eliminations are the instincts we rely on every day, in rooms with much higher stakes than a game show. We tend to imagine bias as something loud: a slur, a policy, an obviously prejudiced decision-maker. Yet, far more often it looks like this: a quiet, confident gut feeling, exercised by ordinary people who would be offended at the suggestion that race had anything to do with it.
None of this means we should stop trusting our instincts entirely. It means we owe those instincts more scrutiny than we currently give them, especially in the rooms where a snap judgment decides who gets hired, who gets believed, or who gets the benefit of the doubt.
The Traitors cannot fix a hiring committee or a jury room. What it can do is force a question those rooms rarely ask themselves: If every vote were recorded and tallied the way they are on the show, would the pattern look this clean? Four episodes into New Blood, the answer is already sitting on NBC, in plain sight, waiting for someone besides the Faithful to notice it.
Dr. Tyson-Lord Gray is an assistant professor of law at the University of Toledo College of Law, where he teaches Business Associations and Legal Ethics, and an adjunct professor at NYU Stern School of Business. He holds a Ph.D. in Ethics and Society from Vanderbilt University and a J.D. from Pace University's Elisabeth Haub School of Law. He is currently completing a book on The Traitors and unconscious bias.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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