Poor, paranoid Lex. How dare someone vote against him at Tribal Council No. 7 after everyone had promised to scribble “Clarence” on their ballot? Lex van den Berghe, the self-proclaimed leader of Moto Maji, can’t cope.

“I will not live with a snake,” he vents. “I will cut the head off of whoever it is that did this ” I’m gonna slit their throat.”

And so begins Lex’s witch hunt.

Of course, we know Teresa is the guilty party, and she did it only to fulfill a promise to Clarence. But Lex doesn’t even suspect her. “You’re the real deal,” he tells her. “I trust my gut over my eyes any day.” Now there’s a sound strategy.

Lex and his gut eventually conclude fellow ex-Boran Kelly was the traitor. His pals Ethan, Tom and Kim J. follow his lead like lambs to the slaughter and vote her off, along with (probably temporary) tag-along Brandon.

These irrational actions result from both group dynamics and the more complex concept of collective behavior. Moto Maji is a social group, like a family, circle of friends or sports team; its members have a common trait and interact frequently and directly within clear social boundaries (in this case, nine people surrounded by wildlife and cameramen). It also has a social structure, with Lex the apparent leader and each member filling various roles.

However, in some of its actions, the tribe is more like a collectivity — an informal assortment of people (e.g., a mob, a crowd at a game, passengers on a bus) who, generally, come together spontaneously/temporarily and interact infrequently within vague social boundaries. People spread over a wide area can also act as a collectivity. Under certain stresses, its members may behave irrationally (such as rioting or, say, accusing one another of witchcraft).

Because of the Survivor game, trust is fleeting among the Moto Maji nine and nobody knows whom to believe — something more characteristic of collectivities than small groups. They may be “friends’ with one another, but they do not know whether their tribemates are being themselves or just playing the game. Such an environment lays the groundwork for paranoia and rumor-mongering, especially when the political order suddenly seems threatened.

Rumors tend to develop when regular channels of communications either don’t work or cannot quickly supply enough information. Not to equate a national disaster with a television show, but think, for example, of Sept. 11, when chaos engulfed the airwaves and “unconfirmed reports’ flew back and forth. Were 11 planes really still unaccounted for? Did a car bomb go off outside the State Department in Washington? Did Nostradamus predict the whole thing? You didn’t know what to believe because everywhere you turned you heard a different story. Panic fed the rumor mill, the rumors fed our panic. It was an endless cycle until the dust settled days later.

On an obviously far less serious scale, similar ideas of uncertainty and (mild) hysteria apply to Moto Maji. Teresa’s vote rattles Lex and strains a situation that by nature is already fraught with paranoia — nine strangers in a strange land trying to backstab their way to $1 million tends to do that.

The mystery vote makes Lex feel he is losing his grip on power, and someone has to pay for it. Tagging a scapegoat quenches his thirst for “justice” — even if it means targeting an innocent ally. Brandon takes advantage of Lex’s paranoia by introducing a rumor to the mix, telling the Tattooed One that he heard Kelly tell Teresa and Frank that she was a “free agent.” Lex buys Brandon’s story — true or not.

“My gut tells me without a doubt that I can trust him,” Lex later tells Tom, “and you know my gut is good.” 

Hello, dramatic irony.

Kelly denies the accusations, but she might as well have been on the witness stand in Salem, claiming not to be a witch: She has no proof, only her word. Although Lex and company have known Kelly far longer than Brandon, they irrationally believe his claims instead of hers. The obvious head-scratcher is, why?

The answers are complex to be sure, but studies on the effects of rumors yield some insight. First, successful rumors tend to resonate with our fears. As Lex tells the camera just before Tribal Council, “After gathering evidence, it became evident that my worst fears, more likely than not, were true.” That “worst fear” was that an original Boran member had betrayed the tribe, and, perhaps more importantly, had targeted Lex in particular. Indeed, one wonders if Lex would be as upset if, say, someone had voted against Tom.

Conversely, rumors, while intensifying panic, can also reduce our worries, in that they may explain things otherwise beyond our control. Rumors also thrive in uncertain situations, where it’s impossible to test their veracity, so virtually any plausible explanation is accepted. This certainly applies to Moto Maji, where no one trusts anyone as far as they can throw a piece of elephant dung.

And once rid of Kelly, Lex will feel much better, right? As Christopher Bigsby explains in an introduction to Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, characteristic of both the Salem witch trials and Sen. Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare hearings was ‘the desire ” to identify those whose purging will relieve a sense of anxiety.” Kelly certainly would understand; she was cast as Abigail, the witch-hunt catalyst, in a college production of the play.

Kelly’s departure, then, is Pepto-Bismol to Lex’s oh-so-accurate gut. But at the rate he’s going, he’d better hope that the next reward is a 10-gallon drum of the pink stuff.

Next Episode: Brandon faces the fallout of his decision; two Survivors go on a reward/date; Tom and company worry about Lex.

Chris Wright, an admitted Survivor addict since Season 1, Episode 3, spends his days as a copy editor for Federal Computer Week in Falls Church, Va. He previously wrote about how the media turns crime stories into narratives. His take on Survivor will appear here each week.

Related Sites:
All Survivor-related articles from PopPolitics can be found here.
For a full summary of the latest Survivor action, and to read up on the castaways, visit the official Survivor site. 
For updates and news stories, check out SurvivorNews.net, Survivorfever.net, or the SurvivorSucks message board. 
RealityBlurred.com does a nice job of staying on top of all "reality TV" programming.

From the University of Virginia, here are documents from the 1692 Salem witch trials. Margo Burns separates fact from fiction in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.
The Urban Legends Reference Page attempts to debunk rumors, including ones stemming from Sept. 11.
Sociologists Ralph Turner and Lewis Killian are leaders in the field of collective behavior. You can read more about rumors, hysteria and the difference between groups and collectivities in their book, Collective Behavior (Prentice-Hall, 1987). Ralph Rosnow is also a respected expert on rumor and gossip (less significant rumors, such as ’so-and-so got a nose job”) and author of Rumor and Gossip: The Social Psychology of Hearsay (Elsevier, 1976)


The Lowdown: Episode 8
Reward challenge: Using a giant lever, the Survivors have to move nine items into an elevated basket. Ethan wins and takes Lex with him to an African village, where they sell two goats and buy various food and luxury items for their tribe.

Immunity challenge: The Survivors must memorize where natural goodies such as elephant dung have been placed on a tic-tac-toe board and duplicate the board on their own. Ethan gets the gold.