Experiment as Spectacle: The Traitors and the Cultural Afterlives of Cold War Social Psychology

This article examines the first British season of The Traitors through the cultural and historiographic afterlives of Cold War social psychology. Rather than treating the series as a simple popularization of canonical experiments, it argues that reality television operationalizes and intensifies the dramatic logics of mid-twentieth-century behavioral science. The studies of Solomon Asch, Stanley Milgram, and Philip Zimbardo emerged from postwar anxieties about authoritarianism, social cohesion, and moral responsibility under conditions of surveillance and pressure. Although the empirical authority of these experiments has been unsettled by ethical and methodological critique, their symbolic power has endured through textbooks, film, and mass media. The Traitors reanimates three tropes-conformity, obedience, and role internalization-within a competitive entertainment format structured around deception and elimination. Using a cultural-historical methodology that combines close textual reading with historiographic analysis, the article situates the program within a broader transformation in the governance of human experimentation. While ethical controversies in psychology contributed to the institutionalization of oversight through institutional review boards and principles of consent and participant protection, reality television operates under contractual neoliberal regimes that aestheticize rather than regulate risk. This comparison reveals how techniques once justified as instruments of knowledge production reappear as mechanisms of spectacle. By tracing these continuities, the study reframes reality television as a site where the ethical tensions and authority dynamics of Cold War social psychology are replayed for mass audiences.