Everyone’s buzzing about The Traitors after its jaw-dropping season finale, and the hit series has a surprising origin. The show is loosely based on a Soviet-era psychological experiment from the 1980s. Created by Moscow State University student Dimitry Davidoff, during the Cold War, the exercise explored deception, trust, and power. The experiment explored how an uninformed majority versus the informed minority behaves under deception. Davidoff later described its evolution into the global game Mafia. That same dynamic now fuels The Traitors, watched by millions worldwide.
