The popular BBC show The Traitors, a game of deception and social strategy, has become a massive hit, with more than 9 million tuning in to the first episode of the latest series.
But the show has inadvertently provided extra entertainment to the UK, by revealing a fascinating insight into the world views of British voters.
Our polling suggests viewers who would prefer to play as a Faithful are more likely to vote Labour, and ones who would prefer to play as a Traitor are more likely to vote Tory.
How can we explain this?
No spoilers: the show involves a group of players and within that group Traitors are secretly appointed. The Traitors must then choose and eliminate the other players, known as the Faithful, by “murdering” them. Meanwhile, they must avoid being sussed out as a Traitor by other contestants, which would mean being voted out of the game.
Working at an organisation exploring the social psychology that drives voter behaviour and concerns, we were naturally interested in whether people’s attitudes towards the treacherous behaviour that The Traitors encourages might tell us any more about their general psyche. So this week we researched whether viewers of the show are more likely to see themselves as a Faithful or a Traitor, as well as what the attitudes of these two groups of viewers can tell us about the British public more generally.
The poll’s findings indicate a stark divide along party lines. Viewers who identified as Faithful – perhaps those who would prefer to play the game honestly and collaboratively – were significantly more likely to align with the Labour Party. In fact, 39 per cent of Faithful viewers expressed support for Labour, compared to only 25 per cent who favoured the Conservative Party. If these Faithful viewers alone could vote in an election, that would be an historic landslide for Labour – with the largest lead in an election the party has ever seen.
Unfortunately for Labour, however, there are Traitors among us, and these voters are much more likely to be Conservative supporters. In fact, 36 per cent of Traitors identified as Tories, while only 24 per cent backed Labour – almost the inverse of the voting patterns of Britain’s Faithful.
A ceasefire at last - but the seeds of future conflicts have been sown
Read MoreWhile these results are mostly a bit of fun, they do reveal something interesting about what is driving voting behaviour in Britain. Political psychologists, for example, often talk about “threat perception” as a key dynamic that shapes voters’ worldviews. If a voter has high threat perception, they are more alert to dangers around them, and more likely to prioritise issues such as crime.
In the general election this year, a high threat perception was one of the strongest indicators of whether someone voted for Reform UK. This was driven in large part by concerns about threats posed by immigration (our polling also showed that Reform UK performs five points better with Traitors; Liberal Democrats five points better with Faithful).
In our polling, we detect that would-be Traitors have significantly higher threat perception than those who see themselves as Faithful. This group’s assumption that there is a high level of danger in the world could lead them to desire greater control over their immediate survival – and on this, the Traitors have the upper hand. This is also why political messaging around “control” (of our borders, of our streets, of our classrooms) resonates most strongly with high threat perception voter groups.
Our polling also shows us that Britain’s Faithful are defined by higher levels of interpersonal trust. On the whole, those who see themselves as faithful are 10 percentage points more likely to agree that “most people can be trusted” over “you can’t be too careful with most people”, when compared to Britain’s Traitors.
In political terms, this greater trust in the collective leads would-be Faithful to vote for left-leaning parties who favour collective action over individual duty. However, in the show, this group’s faith in others might be misplaced: as the brilliant Traitorlytics Twitter account has pointed out, Faithful players are much more likely to lose the game compared to Traitors.
So while our research highlights the depth of Britain’s political divide, there’s one thing both Faithful and Traitors can agree on: nothing brings Britain together quite like watching perfectly normal people become increasingly paranoid over breakfast.
Ed Hodgson is Associate Director for Polling and Analysis at More in Common UK
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