27 March 2025 · Mariam Rashid, Isaac Newton Trust Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Cambridge. Collaboration with Jonathan R Goodman, Cambridge Public Health and author of Invisible Rivals.
What signals do we use to determine trustworthiness? In a climate of increasing misinformation (especially around science) that was the question at the heart of Traitors: This Is My Research. This public engagement event used the format of the hit TV show to examine what and who we choose to trust.
The concept
The format was simple: first, four scientists gave short presentations about their research. Presenters used first names only and gave no institutional affiliations. Two were ‘faithfuls’; they were presenting genuine work and genuine results. Two were ‘traitors’; the were presenting some form of lie. The audience had the opportunity to pose two questions to each speaker before then voting for who they thought was lying. The voting form also invited the audience to reflect on what signals had shaped their judgements.
Audiences were told upfront that they might be fooled, and that being fooled was not a sign of low intelligence or expertise. Trust is socially learned. Cognitive shortcuts are normal human behaviour. The event was a reflection exercise, not a test. In order to hammer this home, in the spirit of the Traitors TV show, the faithful panellists also did not know which of their ‘colleagues’ were traitors.
The traitors were designed to work in two ways: one presenter delivered entirely fabricated content; the other presented genuine research but falsified results.
What happened
The audience voted, and…
both traitors were cleared!
The two faithful scientists received the most votes instead.
Our presenter from the Development Media Initiative presented real work on health information broadcasting. Her team had run ten radio broadcasts a day and, in doing so, had saved lives by sharing health information with communities in the global south. The audience found these results implausible as the scale felt too impressive. The impact seemed too clear-cut. In a flattering turn of events, the work was deemed too impressive to be true. The presenter was also one member of an organisation — this meant presenting some work that she had not personally contributed to. Even though this is common in large collaborations, the fact she seemed uncertain on exact number in one part of the presentation also counted against her. In reality, a traitor would not have bothered to check those numbers, since the truth would not have been important — but the audience deemed her untrustworthy.
Sarah, an astrophysicist, had presented her field of galactic archaeology — the study of the Milky Way’s formation history through the chemical signatures of ancient stars. In four minutes, she could only skim the surface. The audience read that surface-level treatment as a lack of understanding, and the name of the field — galactic archaeology — struck them as too strange to be real. She was voted a traitor.
Post-reveal, I facilitated a discussion by pulling up the audience’s own written comments. The comments were presented to the panellists, who spoke to their own surprise and the lessons they had learnt about trust signals through this panel.
Voting data and written reflections were collected, and these are now being analysed. We hope to release a reflective piece exploring the signals and identity cues used by the audience. The format is designed to be repeatable and will be developed as a scalable public engagement model — please feel free to contact us if you would like to collaborate on a project with this format.