Last week saw the finale of Celebrity Traitors and I, like most of the nation was hooked. (Justice for Joe!) I confess, I am a late comer to the show and haven’t, as yet, watched any of the “civilian” iterations but in the interest of being able to understand what the hell my friends were on about, I tuned in – and here is what I have learned. Don’t trust your gut. Just don’t. I couldn’t think of a better social experiment to show us how unreliable “gut instinct” can be than The Traitors.
In each episode and every round table banishment, contestants made their choices based almost entirely on instinct and were proved wrong again and again and again. “I have to go with my gut”, “I just have a feeling about you”, “I am worried about Tom” and so forth. Banishments were based on funny looks, animated behaviour, feelings, perceived inconsistencies, and how loud or quiet someone had been. It was all about feelings and from a sociological point of view, it was fascinating.
If there is a failing with the show, it’s that contestants aren’t given enough clues to try and find the traitor they just have to guess. Really, all anyone can do is keep asking “are you the traitor” and hope someone cracks. Personally, I would like to see the traitors be given more sneaky tasks to try and pull off so there is a chance they will be rumbled. At least then there would be some evidence for the faithful to get in to. But the fact that they are not means the entire process for elimination comes down to “gut instinct”, which was repeatedly proven to be the real traitor in the group.
Of course, all this flies in the face of the time honoured and well-worn maxim, to “always trust your gut”, but when you boil it all down, the “intuition” that we cling so desperately too is not some primal diviner of truth, but the product of our emotions, cultural bias, paranoia, and apophenia (the tendency to see patterns in unrelated things). Humans can be very clever indeed, but we are also just highly strung apes with massive egos and a sugar fixation, so maybe we need more data to work with than just vibes alone?
Am I saying that there is no such thing as intuition? Of course not. We all have some degree of intuition around who to trust, how to stay safe, and how to predict various outcomes. You might have excellent instinct at work or with your friends and loved ones, but that is drawn from a vast amount of data, gained over years. It is not built into us, it’s learned behaviour and doesn’t translate well outside of familiar settings. Just look at babies and toddlers, running about trying to lick plug sockets and eat cat litter! Where is their mystical “gut instinct”? They seem quite determined to kill themselves as far as I can work out.
Most of us have a story where we “trusted our gut” and were proven right, sometimes eerily so. Someone you didn’t like from the get-go turned out to be a wrong’un, or maybe you were thinking about a loved one when they called you out of the blue. The problem with this kind of scenario is that there is a clearly cognitive bias at work because you only remember the times you were right and not the thousands of times you were not. I don’t know you, dear reader, but if you’re anything like me, cast your mind back over your dating history and then ask yourself how good your gut instinct really is when it comes to sussing out a scallywag.
Research shows us that intuition can be very useful for making snap decisions in settings like the workplace, but not very accurate when it comes to reading people. There are numerous professions where instinct and hunches play a key role – policing, nursing, border control, teaching, for example – but the gut instinct here is based on significantly wider evidence and experience than simply trying to “read” someone else’s motivations just by looking at them.
In fact, recent studies conducted by researchers at Harvard concluded that “empathic accuracy arises more from systematic thought than from gut intuition”. This is why the courts present evidence to juries rather than just asking them what their hunch is, but even then, gut instinct can completely derail a fair trial. All defence barristers know how important it is to be “likeable” on the stand.
We are also really bad at knowing when someone is lying to us. Despite various documentaries, TV shows, and pop psychologists telling us that you can spot a liar through their body language alone, you can’t. There is a wealth of data on this one and pretty much every study concludes that “people are mediocre lie catchers when they pay attention to behaviour”. Across studies, our success rate in weeding out a fibber is about 54 per cent. Which may help explain why the “faithful” failed to spot a visibly nervous Alan Carr telling porkies, even when he was sweating so much that his glasses steamed up. It was obvious to us because we knew.
The problem with all this is not how bad we are at determining truth based on “vibes” alone, but the fact we think we are really good at it! A whopping 81 per cent of us think we can spot a liar just by talking to them. We saw this stat playing out on Traitors when multiple contestants said that they would be good at recognising a liar, only to realise this was far from the case.
Despite our “gut” being unreliable to say the least, we often prefer to follow it, even when empirical evidence is available. Research published by the American Psychological Association found that we get a much higher emotional payoff when we make decisions based on intuition rather than analytics – we feel we have made the “right” call, even if we haven’t.
It gives us a great deal of comfort to believe we have innate instincts that can wheedle out a social menace and spot a liar on sight, but the truth is that we don’t. At least, we don’t with people we don’t know well, in situations we aren’t familiar with. There is a danger in always trusting your gut, and only your gut, when it comes to reading other people for the simple reason it is so often wrong.
Your gut can tell you what you would do in each situation, but not what someone else is going to do. We should always listen to our emotions in making decisions but as Traitors has shown us, we cannot only listen to that. We need to seek out as much evidence as possible and allow the “little voice” only a small role in the overall decision-making process. Either that, or just let Joe Marler make all decisions for you, because his instincts actually seem to be bang on.
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