Reality TV as Deception Lab

Shows like The Traitors provide rare, high‑stakes situations where viewers know exactly who is lying, creating a naturalistic dataset to study deception cues, trust‑building, and group suspicion. Traditional dishonesty studies struggle to establish ground truth, which invites p‑hacking and fragile findings. Mining annotated broadcast footage could improve lie‑detection research and behavioral models of trust. — It proposes a practical, transparent evidence source for contested social‑science questions about lying and trust, potentially upgrading research quality and public literacy.