The Traitors is a game of lies, but what does it really reveal about how our brains decide who to trust? In this episode of Psychology, Actually, Dr Marianne Trent is joined by Dr Ellie Buckley to explore first impressions, thin slice judgements, confidence versus competence, and why our instincts often fail us. From roundtable pressure to the risks of over-trusting AI, they unpack how trust is built, broken, and manipulated both on reality TV and in everyday life. #PsychologyActually #TheTraitors #TrustAndDeception

Timestamps

• 00:00 Introduction: The Psychology Behind The Traitors
• 01:09 Meet Dr Ellie Buckley
• 01:41 Quick-Fire Round: Life Inside The Traitors
• 04:03 Ellie and Ross: The Secret Couple
• 06:50 Life Inside the Castle
• 09:29 Trusting Your Own Instincts
• 12:19 Thin-Slice Judgements and First Impressions
• 14:46 In-Group Bias and Social Influence
• 16:28 Suggestibility and Psychological Safety
• 17:31 How Likeability Builds Trust
• 18:20 Confidence vs Competence
• 20:47 Why Our Judgements Can Be Wrong
• 22:21 Trust, Mistakes and Real Relationships
• 23:31 How Trust Is Built Through Evidence
• 24:02 The Psychology of Team Building
• 25:29 Trust After The Traitors
• 26:18 Can We Trust AI?
• 27:16 AI Therapy and Overtrusting AI
• 29:16 Why Expertise Helps Spot AI's Mistakes
• 30:39 Can We Trust People in Research?

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The Traitors is a game about lies, but underneath the twists, betrayals, and banishments lies a much more interesting psychological question. Why are humans so fascinated by truth and why are we often so bad at recognising it? Today, I'm joined by psychologist Dr. Ellie Buckley, whose time on The Traitors offered a front row seat to trust suspicion and human behaviour. Together, we are exploring why our brains decide who to trust so quickly, why confidence can fool us, and whether we're anywhere near as good at spotting the truth as we think we are. I'm Dr. Marianne Trent, and this is Psychology Actually. Hi, welcome along to Psychology Actually. I'm Dr. Marianne Trent, a qualified clinical psychologist. And if you're watching on YouTube, you might well recognise the face of the lady I'm joined by today. We have got Dr. Ellie Buckley, who you might recognise from Traitors UK Fame.

Hi, faithful. Hi, Ellie.

Hi, really pleased to be here.

So lovely to have you here. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself, Ellie?

Yeah, sure. So I am a chartered psychologist. My background is predominantly academic. I have a PhD in psychology where I looked at autistic people's experiences of working in the arts. And I now work in consulting where I do a mix of organisational psychology, user research with a focus on accessibility and inclusion.

Thank you. Very succinct. And I cannot have been the only psychologist in the country that when watching episode one saw Ellie, psychologist and was like, "Amazing." So yeah, well done for flying the flag for UK psychologists. It was lovely to see you there.

Thank you.

So I thought it might be a little bit of fun to kind of pay homage to the fact that you were on The Traitors and think today about the psychology of trust and judgement . And before we kick off to the main content of the episode, I though if we could have a little bit of a quick fire round about The Traitors, and obviously if you can't comment, you're allowed to say no comment in case the BBC are watching. But yeah, it might be just a really nice way of thinking a little bit about the truths of Traitors. So shall we get started?

Yeah, let's go.

So is Claudia as fabulous as we all want her to be?

She is more fabulous. She's fantastic. She is so nice. She made the time to speak to all of us and she knew our names and just a wonderful woman. Honestly, she deserves all her success.

Oh, well, that makes me like her even more. And how about The Fringe? Is that as good as we want it to be?

It's glossy. It's flowing. I don't know how she gets it so smooth, but yeah, it's real.

I think she's probably got a full-time Fringe consultant ready to tweak at any given moment. I love that answer. Okay, next question. What part of Traitors feels most different when you're in it in the moment than it does on TV?

Oh, that's difficult. I mean, the round table, the round table is a lot more intense than it looks. You're in there for longer than you might see on the TV. And I think especially for me, it definitely can feel quite confrontational until you settle in. And so it takes a few round tables at least for me to relax and go, "Okay, we're not having an argument. We're just playing a game."

Amazing. Yeah, they look long and potentially hot and stressful. Yeah, that looks really like a tricky aspect of Traitors. All right, next question. I am such an early to bed kind of girl. The idea of staying up till 12:00 to leave the castle or do my murdering fills me with horror. Is it actually 12 o'clock or is it like a fake TV 12 o'clock or can you not say?

I can't really get into the details of the timings of the show, but they were very full on days and we were tired. And what I will say is that you think you're going to have enough time when you're going to bed to kind of mull over the day and think about what you learned that day and what to bring in the next day. And actually I was so zonked out. I was like, "I better get my sleep just so I'm ready for tomorrow."

Yeah. I remember watching the celebrity traitors and then one of the traitors was having a nap and then was accused of being overly tired because she was asleep in the day and she was just like, "No, it's because I'm autistic and I've

Got

ADHD and I need..." I was like, "That is the best answer."

I was like, "Cat, you naughty."

Famously, you and your boyfriend Ross went into the castle as a secret couple. "I think I would struggle to not call my husband babe and to be really over familiar with him. "How on earth did you begin to get your heads around that?

Well, it was really challenging. I was definitely really, really nervous around Ross and he actually told me afterwards he thought I was a traitor because I was behaving so weirdly. My strategy essentially was just to avoid him in the castle. So actually if you watch those first few episodes, you're not going to see us in many shots together because every time he entered a room, I would just leave it. Well, I mean, luckily or unluckily for us, there was a lot of other distraction. He had another friend in the castle. And so ultimately we didn't have much time to accidentally call each other babe before it all went wrong anyway.

Oh, I love that. Yeah, just as soon as you see him, Ellie just left the room. That's hilarious. All right. Another one about Ross. How on earth did you manage to not cry or not scream no when Ross were voted out?

Do you know what? We'd got ready. Obviously, we knew we were going on the show before we got there, and so we discussed all the potential scenarios that could happen. And because of that, he had basically a first meeting on the driveway with an old friend and we knew that that was going to be bad. And so I was like, "Right, this isn't going to go well. He's probably not going to survive this." So I'd kind of braced myself from day one, he's probably going to go. So I held it in. I did want to cry, absolutely, but I was also like, "I've got to do this. I've got to do this for the both of us. Hold it together. Don't ruin the game. If he's already out, don't be the one who then gets both of us out at the same time."

Yeah. I've forgotten about that little weird twist. And I presume that was entirely random. Of all the people in the UK, how could you know that you're going to meet someone that you've, I think, previously worked with? Very small world.

Yeah, very much so. And we were not expecting that at all. So it really threw a spanner in the works.

Yeah. And probably ultimately led to his untimely early exit, I would say.

Yeah. Yeah, very much so. I think what he found really frustrating was initially when he saw his friend, he thoght maybe I have a super advantage. I've actually got two allies in this game. But unfortunately, Nettie was so excited. She called out him in front of everyone and obviously the traitors will pick up on anything to try and influence the game. So it was an easy way to make everyone focus on them.

So an easy way to lose trust in who they knew was a faithful and to make themselves look gloriously golden.

Yeah,

Very much. Do you film solidly for days and weeks on end, or do you get some days off to decompress?

Yeah, I can't get too much into the filming schedule, but we are really well looked after. There are down days where we can kind of recuperate.

Good. I'm pleased to hear it because I just think it's a lot to manage all those different parts, as well as just being your normal human self as well. Are you allowed to text your mom or is there no phones available?

No. No devices, no phones. You have no contact with the outside world while you're in the castle.

Oh, so you had to get a bit analogue then and kind of really think about me, myself and I.

Yeah. And I think that's possibly what I found quite challenging about the game as well is I'm used to working things out through conversation. I will go to Ross or someone else to talk through my thoughts and sound them out. And actually sounding things out just with yourself, you kind of get caught in a spiral sometimes and you're like, "I don't know if I'm correct, if I'm not, I need a sounding board and I didn't have one."

Okay. So being alone is just like being in an echo chamber where you're just like, "No, I've had this theory already." That's not going to work. I love that. Other than Ross, have you stayed in touch with anyone?

Yeah, absolutely. We've all got the group WhatsApp and then I see some of the players every now and then. We were really lucky to see Harriet recently. She's a good friend. And then we see Jade sometimes as well and Jesse. So yeah, we've stayed in touch.

And I love how much it's kind of transformed Steven and Steven's career and some of the stuff he's getting to do because of his flamboyant outfits basically. Did you have to have a think about what am I going to wear on camera every day?

Yeah. Oh, definitely. I had a think and I was like, it's funny when you're going on a show like this and you're like, "I want to have fun, but I also want to maintain some professionalism because I've got a career." And so I was like, "How do I dress in a way that I'm serious enough?" I don't know if I got it quite right, but also it was like I didn't have the budget to go and buy a bunch of new clothes. So I was like, "I've just got to pull from what I've got and we'll just make it work."

Yeah. And I guess even going forwards, brands are not necessarily going to be able to work with contestants because it's all really cloak and dagger, so to speak, about who's going in. So yeah, maybe start curating your own, if I'm on traitors, this is what I'm going to wear wardrobe when

You're

Shopping.

Ultimately, Steven's wardrobe was really affected. He even referenced the idea that he'd wear a more flamboyant outfit on a day where he was under suspicion to draw attention to the outfit rather than everything else. And I thought that was a great idea.

That really is a good strategy. By the end of filming, do you feel like you trusted your instincts more or less?

Less. Less. I was completely lost in there. I think when I found out who the traitors were, I just, you know what, with Rachel, I though she was a fantastic player, so skilled, and it's really weird to watch it back and obviously see that she was made a traitor from the beginning because it was just really hard to imagine her being a traitor. She was so convincing and I though, wow, that is such an interesting thing to learn that you really can't spot people. And I think I though I had better intuition than I did, but a really good learning experience. And maybe it just illustrates that the game's very difficult.

Yeah, I think so. And also it's so person specific. So I can tell when my eldest son lies to me because he's, I don't know, he just got these tells that I can see. My youngest son, rarely can I tell if he's lying. And that's when I know them that well. But I was thinking partly because I messaged you during the show and obviously you weren't allowed to tell me anything, but I was like, oh, maybe Ellie could be the secret traitor. But then I was like, God, if a secret traitor is a psychologist who then goes on to win the show, are we going to set back the trust in psychologists and mental health practitioners to the point of destruction? Can we ever come back from that? So I think personally, I'm maybe a little bit glad that you weren't the secret traitor.

Yeah, no, I'm ultimately pleased they wasn't a traitor. I did ask to be a traitor. I though it's a game and this is a game and we need to separate how we play a game from how we operate in the real world. But I would've been absolutely rubbish traitor. I actually don't have it in me. I could barely be a faithful. I was struggling to even keep the secret of my relationship. I felt so guilty. So yeah, ultimately I was a faithful at heart, even if I hadn't quite identified that.

Yeah. I think I'd be the same. I think I've tried to be really authentic in everything I do, and so I think I would've really struggled. But also the whole Alan Carr thing, even when you try and say I am a faithful or I'm a traitor, I really think that I would accidentally say I am, because obviously I'm a traitor because even the show is called traitors. It's really hard to not just say those words.

Yeah. And we saw, I think Rachel made a verbal slip up quite late in the game, but ultimately things were so deep in actually the players didn't notice. But yeah, I think it's really challenging. And yeah, saying something, just lying, it's just difficult and it's a lot of pressure you're putting on yourself. And I don't know, credit to some of the players who could do that really well. It's a skill.

It is a skill and we won't ask any more about their psychopathology, about why they're so good at that. Love it. Right. Thank you so much for playing my little quick fire round about the truth of traitors, Ellie. Let's get on with the main content of our episode. So the traitors is almost social experiment in the first impressions of people and strangers. How good do you think we are at that as humans?

Oh, do you know what? Intuition, it depends. It depends. We know that we make judgements very, very quickly. In psychology, they look at things called thin slice judgments. People are very quick to make a decision about what they think about someone's going to be like, whether they're going to be friendly or unfriendly, whether they think they're going to get on with them. And we are accurate to an extent and that's to help us decide who's a threat to us. There's a reason why we're quick to judge, but it's so prone to bias. And so we have to understand our own biases to try and consciously unpick them because if we don't do that, then we're going to make incorrect judgments about a lot of people.

Absolutely. I don't think I've heard the term thin slice judgments before. I'm guessing the opposite would be thick slice, that you've got more context, more awareness, longer time period.

I guess so. Do you know what? It's not 100% my area, but as in, yeah, there's lots of experiments where essentially thin slice judgements are where participants are shown a really short clip. It might be video clip, an audio clip of someone, and then they'll be asked to decide on their characteristics. And they can be surprisingly accurate about some of their personality traits, other things, but it's very prone to bias. So it's definitely not a perfect system.

Yeah, that rings a bell of something I've been reading recently on psychopaths. And actually when people are shown very short clips of people with high psychopathic traits, they are better at spotting whether they might be a psychopath or not. When it's longer, I've got longer for the person to poison your narrative and your kind of guesses, it's harder. And I wonder if that's maybe what's going on in the traitors as well. Your initial thin slice judgement might then be undone by all of the wizardry, all of the puppetry of the show.

Very much so. And then also you then, as the game moves on, I think you then need to think about that kind of in-group bias, your own want and desire to be part of the in-group and to listen to the authority figures in the game and to kind of, what do you call it? Yeah, just be in the group. You don't want to stand out. And so sometimes your initial judgement , you might override it to try and fit in with what other people are saying as well. And I think we can all be prone to that sometimes.

Absolutely. It's right back to our primitive brains, isn't it, that actually being mammals, being part of something and not being by yourself and isolated is so important because you're vulnerable otherwise. And that crops up at all different stages of our life, doesn't it? It crops up in schools where you want to be part of something, even in workplaces and in friendship groups. It's everywhere and it would be silly of us to think that isn't cropping up in TV shows like The Traitors.

Yeah, very much. You were literally fighting to survive in that show because you could get banished by the group every day. And so I think at that point, when you are then trying to fit in with the group and you are trying to keep your mind open to other people's opinions and thoughts and their kind of sway, then you start to maybe go, "Oh, maybe I didn't get that right. I definitely got into a place where I was really doubting my own intuition, my own ability to work out things. And I was trying to listen to other people as authority figures." And I mean, it's just an exercise in learning more about yourself and how quickly you place someone else's up on a pedestal and listen to their opinion over your own. So yeah, a lot of learning.

Do you think suggestibility comes into this? Do you think any players are more likely to be suggestible and therefore more easily swayed? Or do you think it's just down to what happens on the day and who you end up with?

Your suggestibility can change, I think, depending on the context, depending on how confident you feel, depending on who you feel like the leader is in that situation, depending on how safe you feel to express. We can think about psychological safety. How safe do you feel to express a dissenting opinion? And if you don't, do you then turn inwards and start to doubt your own feelings or do you hold it strong even if you're not expressing?

Yeah. And I think there was something around confidence, isn't there, that Steven almost detracted that attention from him because it was just his flamboyant character and he was kind of naturally a leader. It felt a little bit like the big dog theory for the celebrity traitors with Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross. And it felt very much like Steven was kind of the equivalent big dog.

Yeah. I think Steven was very likeable. He worked really hard to bond with everyone, be very kind to people, complimentary. And that goes a long way in getting people to trust you. And then once you've built some trust, they then don't want to doubt you. And I think that's the great thing about the game and what's so tricky is that you start to form bonds and friendships and then you don't want to doubt your friends. And that's where it becomes really difficult.

Absolutely. That's how we begin to trust people as friendships and live as tribes really, that we need to be able to think that some people are trustworthy.

Yeah, absolutely. We have to find a way through, haven't we? And we're just looking for who we can kind of assess as the most trustworthy. It doesn't always mean we're right, but we're going to try.

For sure. Do you think we sometimes mistake confidence for competence when it comes to trust?

Yeah, very much so. What I kind of understand from research is that confidence often comes from the coherence of the story that you can make rather than the actual competence. So it's like if you can make a narrative that makes sense to you, you're much more likely to trust it. And that's the same if you're listening to someone else. If they sound coherent, you're much more likely to trust what they're saying and it's not actually about whether the facts actually back it up. So yeah, there can be a lot of confounding factors between competence and confidence.

Absolutely. And I do think maybe Alan Carr got so far in his journey because people already had this kind of coherent narrative of what he was like. Whereas obviously if he had come into the castle as a non-celebrity, just sweating profusely and being quite flamboyant, it might not have had the same outcome for him.

Yeah. And it's essentially like, are people fitting your expectations? And obviously in the civilian traits, we don't know each other, so we don't have expectations. And that's obviously where the kind of more difficult things around bias can come in and what are you expecting of certain people versus other people? But yeah, absolutely. And then it's someone behaving consistently through the experience as well. And Ross had picked up that actually Steven hadn't blushed on the train when we first met him and then he was blushing through the rest of the experience. So maybe, but obviously Ross didn't get a chance to really put that theory out there. And the traitors are picked so early, you don't really get a chance to know your fellow players very well before everything's begun. And so it's really hard to pick out, are they meeting my expectations for a traitor versus for a faithful because people were nervous for all sorts of reasons in the game and lots of people were displaying nervous or slightly odd behaviour, but because of different causes.

Yeah. I think Steven might have said, "Well, I wasn't wearing any synthetic fibres on the train and now I am and it's really hot." I love that. Obviously when we're looking at social judgments, we do not always get it right, do we?

No, very much so. But what can be really tricky is that we don't always get feedback that we're wrong. Often if we make an incorrect judgement , no one's telling us. People might secretly be thinking something, but actually it's quite rare to receive corrective feedback. And so then we can just carry on with those biases that we're carrying.

Yeah. And I think so much of what we do and what we learn and how we learn is context specific. So even when really horrendous things happen, but it's a result of a really quick impulsive accident or just something that you've overlooked or neglected to do that you'd usually do 99 times out of a hundred, people will always be in the comments, "Well, of course you couldn't be trusted because you didn't do that or you didn't do that." And it's like, "Well, I didn't mean for this to happen. Had I known this was going to happen, I absolutely would've done that. I'm usually a very trustworthy person, but we're not perfect people all of the time, are we?"

Oh, well, yeah, you're talking about putting things out online and you're making yourself vulnerable. And I think we always have this expectation for people to be perfect and to not make mistakes and not be fallible. And it's tricky because even when we want to be given that grace ourselves, I think initially when we watch other people's content or I don't know, anything you're watching, you don't hold them to that same kind of standard. You're like, "Oh, why have you got it wrong? I can't trust anything you're saying now." It's very easy to slip into that black and white thinking of, "Oh, you've lost all my trust if you've done one thing that hasn't kind of matched what I've expected."

Yeah, absolutely. And real relationships aren't like that, are they? We have to be able to tolerate grey areas. We shouldn't have to tolerate massive red flags all the time, but people can really annoy us. My husband annoys me regularly and I really annoy him regularly, but you have to be able to work through that and know that this isn't our trust that's been affected. I'm just annoying, which I am.

How do you keep trust? You kind of have to keep showing up and you build trust through evidence, don't you? You can't just expect people to trust you from the get go. You kind of have to show them that they can trust you.

Yeah. And that's really interesting when it comes to schools and teachers, I think. So observing it as a parent, the teachers that have had the most successful interactions and working relationships with my children have been those that allow the relationship to develop, that earn that trust. The least successful ones have been the ones that have marched in and demanded that trust and demanded that respect upfront, which is just not going to work well for us as humans, I don't think.

No, very much. And if I even bring it back to the traitors, I think that's the value of the challenges. But also what's tricky is that those challenges are designed to get us working as a group, building trust because we're helping each other in those situations, which then makes it more challenging at the round table to doubt someone if they've helped you earlier that day, for instance.

That's so true. And it's like every psychology away day that you've ever been on, isn't it? Build this thing out of marshmallows and breadsticks. It's that kind of vibe.

Very much so. Yeah. And it works though. I think we scoff at the team building, but we often come away from those days actually feeling closer to our colleagues, feeling bonded, and it works.

I think so. And also because when you've got. I mean, I don't know if you've ever had to transition a friendship from workplace to real life, but work can point you at a specific task and then give you those kind of parallel shared experiences. Whereas sometimes there's magic in the small talk, isn't there, which you do get away days and team building and when you're under pressure or just outside of a normal environment, so the normal environment would be the castle, you get to see more nuance to people, I think, don't you?

Yeah, absolutely. It gives you a chance to get to know them in greater capacity and you stop doubting them. It was a really nice break from being paranoid to just focus on a shared goal. But yeah, it did make it a lot more challenging to then pick apart who was a traitor because then you are looking at behaviour in the team building going, "Well, who ran for a shield? Why did they do that?" And then you're reinterpreting everything everyone's done. I remember poor Sam, he was a faithful, had gone and got a shield because he was worried. But ultimately I remember thinking, "Actually, I think that's traitorous behaviour. I think you're faking it." And you get in a real loop about things. So yeah.

Oh, I mean, the ethics of it are just something else, aren't they, what we're doing to people, but hopefully it's a contained enough experience. It doesn't leak too much over into your normal life. Did you find yourself thinking, "Are you telling me the truth when you left the castle?" Well,

I think luckily with Ross being a faithful and me being a faithful, I think we were luckily in a situation where we hadn't had to lie to each other extensively because that could have put a lot of pressure on our relationship. I do wonder how the partners and friends and family of traitors feel when they've watched them do really well at the game and then they come back into their real life and you go, "Wow, I didn't know you could lie that well."

Oh, to be a fly on the wall in those conversations, right? I think when we're thinking psychologically, AI is such a big topic at the moment. How do we begin to trust AI? How do we begin to not over trust AI?

I don't know whether trusting AI is the goal. I think working with it realistically, probably understanding its limitations and thinking about how transparent it's being with you and not expecting more of it.

It is a tricky question, but thank you for running with that. And people, as they go through health systems, are seeing more and more kind of non-human approaches, even for assessing things and outcome measures. Sometimes people are not even going anywhere near a practitioner, a psychologist, a therapist. They're doing it all with AI or all with computerised programmes. That is a lot of trust. Is that still trust?

Well, yeah, I think people are putting their trust in it, and I think that's why education around AI is so important. I saw a great discussion online about someone who was using an AI chatbot as their therapist, and they wanted to transition from you talking to their real therapist to just using the AI chatbot. And someone wrote a great reflection on the idea that AI chatbots, they're constantly available to you. They're not going to challenge you. And part of the therapeutic work is to be challenged and to go through kind of difficult times with your therapist to do the work, get through something. And so what's complicated is the AI chatbot's never going to tell you to go away, is it? It's giving us a false expectation of how much other people should be available to us. And it can also, I think when we're talking about that conflation of confidence and accuracy, often AI will produce results and it will tell you this is the answer.

And you have to have the working knowledge that actually that could be wrong, even if it's saying it in a very confident way. It's tricky. Education, education, education, education. We need to understand that even when AI is telling you something is definitive, you have to go and check.

You do. And I fell foul of that when it gave me a route from Houston Station to get to a studio location and told me it was just a simple six minute walk.

And

When I arrived at Houston Station, it was pouring with rain. It told me it was six minutes. I though, okay, right, we're committed. And then it turns out, no, no, no, actually. Oh yes, I was wrong. Sorry. It's actually 27. Th's

A long walk.

And I arrived at the studio completely dripping, soaked through, like dripping on their carpet. It was not my finest hour. So yeah, let's not use blind trust in our AI is what I would say.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think when I'm working as a researcher, and I think when you're using AI in your own discipline and you really understand you've built up the knowledge over time, I can then see all the failings in the output. I can see all the limitations. But when I use an AI chatbot to ask it something that I don't know much about, the answer sounds completely reasonable to me. And I think that really illustrates the difference is that when you have expertise, you can see that it's not producing great output all of the time.

Yeah, because it can't until you, I guess, really train it or

Really

Get it to get focused or to, I guess it's where it gets tricky as well to mimic the voice or the sound or the likeness of the opinion of someone else. I know that if I was to use ChatGPT as my therapist, I would, I think, become quite narcissistic because it thinks I'm amazing.

Yeah. It's very complimentary, isn't it? And I think that can be risky.

Yes, it can. It's almost like it's love bombing you constantly. And that's another thing to be mindful of, isn't it, with people? If people are being excessively nice to us all the time, I think it should make us think whether they actually are as trustworthy as they might seem.

Very much so. Yeah. What's it trying to do there, constantly complimenting us?

Yeah, I think it's one to watch for sure. Your work as a researcher, Ellie, must absolutely have depended on people telling you the truth or you feeling like they were telling you the truth. How do you navigate that in psychology?

Yeah. Well, I mean, yes. Where do I start? Okay. So yeah, I think when I am interviewing someone for research, I have to think about the pressure they might be under to give me the answers they think I want to hear. So that's a really important thing to consider when you're doing research. And you do everything you can to try and encourage an honest and psychologically safe environment. And you would do that before you ever start talking to the participant or the user. In the way that you even lay out the research, the information you share ahead of time, the consent you get from your participant, you need to say it's okay to express yourself and not here to judge what you're saying. You also need to let them know what's going to happen to the information. That's really important. How anonymous they're going to be in the process, because a lot of people will worry that if they share something negative, that may have a consequence later down the line.

If you are working for an organisation and they think, is someone going to hear about that I said this and am I going to lose a benefit or something? So you have to be really clear about how you're operating, how your ethics are laid out. You have to be as transparent as possible.

And even then you're still going to get people not being wholeheartedly honest with you, maybe because they don't feel comfortable, maybe because they wouldn't even be comfortable to acknowledge that to themselves. There's a lot going on. It depends what you're asking, doesn't it? So I don't think we can eliminate the idea that people might not tell you the whole truth in research or in other settings, but we can try as hard as we can to make it a safe environment to encourage them to.

Yeah. It's what the consequences would be of being completely truthful, isn't it? And I think even when I've been working in employed services as a psychologist, if I'm completely truthful about everything, I might not get to keep you as my psychologist anymore. And actually I'm really, really valuing this work that I'm doing with you. So maybe I'll just make out that I'm a little bit less good so that I can get a properly enmeshed experience of this work with you and feeling better and making progress in the way I feel hopefully in a lasting way because that's what we want. We want people to be free of distress in a way that helps them live better lives ultimately. Yeah.

And I think that's so tricky when you talk about services and obviously you are working to a remit where you might only be able to offer people that service if they meet certain criteria and then once they're out of it, unfortunately they then have to move on even if what would be best is for them to continue seeing you. And then I think when we talk about research, we'll often give incentives for someone to take part in a research session. They might get some money. And so the way we try and combat that is because they'll want to take part in the research to earn the money and then they might think that they have to say certain things or stay through the whole session even if they're uncomfortable. And so what we try to do is maybe give the incentive right at the beginning.

So we're like, you could leave the session after five minutes, you've still been paid for your time, but it's not a perfect system.

That is so important and thank you for bringing that up because ethically, I think that does matter. And when people are listening to this podcast, perhaps thinking about their own research, I don't think I'd ever really consider what time to give that reward. And I think upfront is safest psychologically and that's absolutely going to set your study up, I think, for the best.

And I think when we're looking at many of the ways that people might be involved in psychology, sometimes litigation is part of that. And it reminds me when I was working with people with traumatic brain injuries, there's actually whole tests that are designed to work out whether someone is faking good or faking bad or a really terrible term called malingering. And so just having the knowledge that actually there are a battery of tests that you can use to help work out. I don't know if you've ever done an outcome measure with someone and it's like all fours or all five across the board and you're like, that is quite unusual that someone would score really, really highly on every single measure. So when I see that, I'm often like, oh, okay, I wonder what that's about. Or conversely, I don't know about you, but during the pandemic, I feel like people got a bit more anxious and people got a bit more lower in mood.

And so even when we would begin to complete the GAD-7 or the PHQ-9 or a screening measure like that, we wouldn't expect to have a zero score because actually there's a lot of stress in the modern day world that you'd be tripping up. So when you're getting complete negatives on things, but that can be a sign, I think, to ask more questions.

Yeah, very much so. And if I think back to my time working in assessment services like autism assessment, ADHD assessment, I was an assistant psychologist and we understand that it's such a long journey to get to your assessment date and you may have formed your own opinions about what's going on for you and you may be invested in a certain outcome and that might be a diagnosis of something. And it can be really, really challenging to unpick what's actually going on for someone versus what they think is going on versus maybe what the clinical psychologist would kind of surmise is going on. And it's just really challenging and I can see it from all perspectives. You've been alone for a long time, you've had to work things out and you've kind of gone, this is it. And then it can be a much more complex conversation when you actually get into the assessment process.

Yeah, it can indeed. And even telling people we're a psychologist can get people's hackles up and they think that we're mind readers, don't they? I get that a lot. But I think I'm right in saying you didn't tell people you were a psychologist when you went into the castle, is that

Right? No, I didn't because I didn't want them to pre-form any opinions. And so I was actually telling everyone I was a nanny, which I didn't think it made the final cut and ultimately wasn't important. And actually all that did for me was put more pressure on myself because then I was having to. I have worked as a nanny previously, so I was drawing on real experience, but I wasn't currently working as one. So I was kind of having to slightly make up this, "This is what I'm doing as a nanny now." And I was like, "This is really distracting from actually playing the game." But yeah, I think people make lots of assumptions about psychologists and only half of them are right.

They do, but I can quickly see while you were just having this whole narrative that must have been making your head spin and trying to almost remember what you have and you haven't told people, which must have just made your time so much more challenging. I have to say, Ellie, having met you, having spent time with you, I would like to correct the judgement of you as being bland, the most bland contestant. I thought that was so mean. I don't think that should have been able to be asked of anybody. That felt unjust and I would say it's not fitting of you at all.

Thank you. Thank you. I mean, I understand that those challenges are designed to provoke, so I get why they do it. And I also understand that because I was holding back so much information from my fellow players, I was giving them a very bland version of me. I wasn't talking to them about my relationship, about my work, about anything. I was just going.

Yeah. And I think that's probably quite interesting, isn't it? Because actually when we do make relationships with people, it's based on us being a bit invested, I think. And if it all feels just like business, then you feel like this person hasn't really got a foot properly in the relationship. So maybe that's what they were kind of picking up on is that it felt a little bit one-sided or you weren't a multidimensional person because clearly you weren't saying, "I've got a boyfriend called Rossi's great," because that would've thrown you under the bus.

Yeah, very much so. And I understood before going into the castle that group bonding was really important to this game, but the reality was I'd put all these kind of barriers in place for myself, not really thinking this through about how I was going to bond with the group, because actually, yeah, I'd really limited myself there about what I could talk about.

Well, I have loved talking with you, Ellie. Thank you for joining me. Where can our audience learn more about you and your work?

I'm on social media. My Instagram is doctor_ellieb, and same on TikTok.

Perfect. I will make sure that I link all of that in the show notes, but thank you so much for your time being a lovely, thoughtful guest thinking with us about trust.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you again to my guest for her time, Dr. Ellie Buckley. You might be watching this because you're a fan of The Traitors or the Celebrity Traitors, which has brought new audiences to the show. I am very much looking forward to seeing how the Celebrity Traitors Series two unfolds. I am a big fan of Ramash Ranganathan, Richard E. Grant, and James Blunt. His antics on social media are just hilarious, defending his trolls. So I'm really especially looking forward to seeing how all three of those get on. What do you think? Are you any good at spotting? Whether people are telling lies, whether they're telling truths, half truths. I'd love to know what tells you can spot in people you know or maybe do you know your own psychological tells or cues? Do spill, drop it in the comments on YouTube, or if you're listening on Spotify, you can drop episode specific comments.

So I'd love to hear your thoughts. If you are enjoying this episode, I'd love it if you would tag myself and Dr. Ellie Buckley and share it on your socials. It really does help me to make sure that the audience reaches fresh eyes and ears. There will be an inner work episode coming out, so keep your eyes peeled on that for 8:00 PM on Wednesday. And then the next episode of this podcast, Psychology Actually will be available from 4:00 PM Saturday on YouTube and from 6:00 AM on Monday, wherever you get your podcasts. In this episode, we discuss psychopathy. If you've enjoyed this episode, which is all about truth and lies and deception, I think you'll get on very well indeed with this episode that is marked in the show notes and is on screen, all about psychopaths and how we can spot them, where they might be lurking, and the kinds of behaviours that might be showing up for people with psychopathic traits in everyday life.

Stay tuned. Thanks for being part of my world. I'll see you soon. Take care.