The Traitors: New Blood premiered on NBC tonight, September 17, 2026, with a two-hour episode that strips away the format's usual celebrity cushion for the first time in the US: this is an all-civilian season, dropping 22 total strangers into Alan Cumming's Scottish castle with zero prior read on each other. Within hours of the premiere, the franchise's oldest argument resurfaced right on schedule — which MBTI type actually makes the best liar?
What's New About New Blood
No Reality Stars to Hide Behind
Every previous US season leaned on people who already had some public persona to perform. New Blood's cast is 22 everyday Americans who, as NBC Insider puts it, will genuinely know little to nothing about their fellow players going in. That's a meaningfully different game: no pre-built alliances from other shows, no camera-trained instincts, just raw social read.
The Numbers Behind the Season
More than 60,000 people applied for those 22 spots. The season was filmed at Ardross Castle in Ross-shire, Scotland, with the winners splitting a prize fund worth up to $250,000 — assuming the Faithfuls manage to vote out every Traitor before the money's gone.
The Case for Warm Types: ESFJ and ISFJ
Charm as Camouflage
Truity's breakdown of the format argues that the warmest, most outgoing types have a built-in disguise. ESFJs, it notes, come across as so friendly and open that their warmth alone disarms suspicion — nobody expects the person actively taking care of everyone else's feelings to be the one plotting their elimination.
Loyalty as a Weapon
ISFJs get an even sharper version of the same advantage. Their reputation for dependability and quiet loyalty works against the Faithfuls: because ISFJs read as fundamentally trustworthy, Truity argues, "no one will suspect a thing." The empathy that normally makes them good group members becomes, in this game, the exact cover a Traitor needs.
The Case for Strategists: INTJ and ENTJ
Deception as a Mission
The counterargument is that warmth isn't the only route to a good lie — planning is. Truity describes ENTJs as treating deception "like a well-planned mission," anticipating other players' suspicions before they surface rather than reacting to them in the moment. That's a very different skill set from the ESFJ's instinctive charm: it's premeditation.
Composure Nobody Questions
INTJs, meanwhile, win by never explaining themselves. Truity notes they tend to state something once, mean it, and move on without second-guessing — and because their internal reasoning is already opaque to other people, nobody has much to push back against. Add in ENTJs' calm, composed demeanor, and both types read as "far too collected to be deceiving anyone," which is exactly the point.
| Type | Deception style | Why it works |
|---|---|---|
| ESFJ | Instinctive charm | Warmth disarms suspicion before it starts |
| ISFJ | Quiet dependability | Reputation for loyalty makes accusation feel absurd |
| ENTJ | Planned mission | Anticipates suspicion and out-strategizes it |
| INTJ | Controlled opacity | Says little, never over-explains, invites no follow-up |
Why "Spotting a Faithful" Theories Keep Failing
The Late-to-Breakfast Myth
It's not just type theory that gets tested every season — so do viewers' pattern-spotting shortcuts. Season one player Ivan Brett recently shot down a popular fan theory nicknamed the "Laithful" strategy, which held that the last people to arrive at breakfast were usually innocent Faithfuls who'd narrowly avoided being murdered overnight. Brett called it "categorically wrong," pointing out that in season one's fourth episode, Traitor Amanda was among the last to arrive despite no murder having happened that night. He noted the same held true multiple times in season two.
Brett's sharpest point cuts right to the MBTI debate too: you can only spot that pattern in hindsight, once you already know who the Traitors are. In real time, a Faithful has no reliable tell to lean on — which is exactly why a warm ISFJ and a composed INTJ can both walk away from breakfast unsuspected for entirely different reasons.
What It Means for This Season
With 22 strangers who've never built a public persona to fall back on, New Blood may end up testing the warm-versus-strategic debate more cleanly than any celebrity season before it — there's no pre-existing image to perform, just raw type-driven instinct under pressure. Whether this season's Traitors win by charm or by planning, expect the debate to run hot every week until the finale.
-EditorZ
Photo by LoboStudio Hamburg on Unsplash
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