The Traitors star Rachel did FBI training – so I did it too

This series of The Traitors has been full of bombshell revelations – and Rachel’s admission to FBI training shook the contestants to the core.

During episode seven of the hit BBC show, Rachel came clean at the round table: ‘For the last few months, I have been trained by a former FBI agent on the beauty of micro-expressions and people’s ability to lie.

‘And I have profiled every single one of you. I know what to look out for.’

The room was left stunned, and it seemed to only add to her perceived trustworthiness, despite being one of the most calculated players in the game.

Rachel’s declaration made me realise something – that I should do some FBI training of my own.

Could the training help me feel more equipped to seek out deceitful characters in my life (hopefully, there aren’t too many)? And would I be left convinced that Rachel’s training could plausibly help her win the game?

So, I signed up to Award-Winning Lie Detection Course: Taught by FBI Trainer, facilitated by the online learning platform Udemy.

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It’s classed as a human resources course and falls under the sub-category ‘Lie Detection’.

Led by Dr David J. Lieberman, who has trained FBI profilers and CIA operatives, the course promises to teach you how to ‘tell if anyone is lying without ANY interaction – from listening to a conversation or speech’.

Unlike Rachel’s training, which she said she’d been undertaking for ‘the last few months’, this one only took an hour.

Regardless, it had been tried and tested by over 2,000 people and boasted a 4.3-star rating – I was ready to get stuck in.

Here are my takeaways from the 60 minutes I spent learning about lie detection.

It’s all in the semantics

While some people hone in on what physical giveaways might indicate somebody is lying, this course focused more on the syntax and semantics of a person’s prose.

Things like the structure of somebody’s statement were analysed. For example, if they’re rushed to come to an ending and use phrases like: ‘I don’t know what else to say’ (ahem, Stephen), then they’re more likely to be lying.

Other tell-tale signs were said to be around the use of pronouns – overuse or lack thereof was considered a red flag in some instances – and shifting from the active to the passive tense.

I’d forget it all under pressure

The course consisted of nine mini videos laden with information, meaning I took eight pages of written notes.

It was a fair bit to take in, and like with any kind of learning, I’d need to revise the facts if I were to stand any chance of remembering them.

This made me think… the round table seems like one of the most pressurising environments (if the progression of Stephen’s reddening skin tone is anything to go by), and I would not back myself to recall all of the nuanced ways that somebody’s sentence structure can reveal their deceit.

Surely it takes years of training, practice and lived experience for any of this to stick.

Even then, we all saw how Amanda fared.

Nothing is a hard and fast rule

Amanda, as an example of somebody who has actually worked as a detective, brings me to my next point.

In the short course, Lieberman reiterated how lots of the things we were learning had the potential to be completely wrong.

The signs that could help detect a liar in lots of cases might not apply to all, which evidently makes the skill hard to teach.

There are also plenty of rules that appear contradictory on first glance and would require more detailed analysis to successfully find the discreet changes that differentiate between someone who is being honest and someone who is lying.

Give too many details while recounting a situation, and you’re distracting from the truth. Give too little, and you’re proving you don’t know your own story – there’s a fine line of distinction!

And of course, all it takes is a little bark up the wrong tree, and there’s no coming down.

The Faithfuls are implicating themselves

Something that did occur to me while partaking in the course is that by Lieberman’s standards, the Faithfuls are implicating themselves!

According to the FBI trainer, using words and phrases like ‘honestly’, ‘trust me’ and ‘believe me’ can leave you sounding like a caricature of an honest person.

He also argues that ‘oversell expressions’, like saying you’re ‘100% not guilty’, might be a situation of one doth protest too much.

This is bad news for the contestants who rely on the phrase ‘100% faithful’ like it’s ingrained into their language model.

These desperate attempts to appear credible could form some basis for the number of reasons so many Faithfuls are banished from the series despite being totally blameless.

Or maybe they prove that no amount of training can ever truly spot a liar?

A great course for a Traitor

Finally, I came away from this course thinking that, of course, out of all the players, Rachel is the one to have completed something similar.

If anything, this kind of training can set you up perfectly to avoid all giveaways that are associated with lying.

As a player, Rachel is very considered in what she says, and doesn’t burden her sentences with unnecessary detail or language.

She skilfully chooses her words and is rarely convoluted in her responses – a trait Lieberman emphasises is an indicator of trustworthiness.

If I were Rachel, I wouldn’t be telling everyone I’d been trained in a course that taught me how not to sound like a liar…

On completing the course, I received a certificate and the reassurance that the techniques I’d learnt ‘will significantly change the way [I] relate to the rest of the world’.

I think this could be a stretch.

If anything, The Traitors has shown us how we all (minus Jessie) can get things terribly wrong and run with a theory that is totally incorrect.

Luckily for the players, this is just a game, and the course I did was just for fun.

But a show like this brings home the importance of hard evidence, and the need for facts – because hints, clues and hunches unfortunately don’t cut it.

The Traitors returns tonight at 8pm on BBC One.

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