Can jurors be wrong?

Hear that sound in the distance? Every time someone strings the words ‘juror’ and ‘wrong’ into a sentence an angel loses its wings, or I’m called a moron online, or both. However, reducing Survivor’s most complex, dynamic and human element to its simplest terms robs the whole premise of the jury of its franchise-defining intrigue. So, I’m here to ask, in hushed tones, can jurors be wrong?

The Customer Is Always Right

Just like the adage that “the customer is always right,” the Survivor community often seeks to waive any criticism of the juror by arguing that ‘the juror is always right’. 

It's your prerogative to judge the jurors by this mantra. In this way, the juror can’t be wrong because, like the customer, even when they’re wrong, they’re right. Both concepts isolate the interaction from greater context, where the juror and customer can do no wrong, even if we’d usually consider behaviors such as emotionality, entitlement, hypocrisy, or even incorrectness to be wrong.

Both dynamics are built on a power imbalance where the customer and juror have little or nothing to lose, and the service provider and finalist have everything to lose or gain. The onus falls on them and the customer, or juror, must be catered to. 

Still, I think most of us don’t like the idea of irate customers acting with total impunity. Survivor is even more complicated. Let’s extrapolate.

How Do You Define ‘Right’?

I like to think jurors are always ‘valid,’ without necessarily being ‘right.’ Alternatively, you could say jurors can’t be ‘wrong’ on the task at hand – vote for whomever you want for whatever reason you want – but they can still vote ‘badly.’

The spectrum of the quality of their votes warrants analysis. For example, if a juror’s game awareness is divorced from reality and they vote on their own criteria of game merits that are factually incorrect, that’s valid, but it’s hard to say it’s right. If a player is hateful or bigoted and their vote follows suit, they’re not wrong in the task they were given, but the quality of the vote is clearly bad.

If you consider the jury vote ‘right’ by the very definition of a jury voting, then the question becomes, can a juror even be criticized?

Human or God

I often say I know jurors can be wrong because jurors are humans and humans are regularly wrong. Jurors aren’t just human: they’re humans at their most flawed, having just lost their dream on a national stage. They’re upset, embarrassed and ego driven. Their information is unsound from a game that ousted them to a Ponderosa constructed in clashing agendas. They want to be right, but they also want to be important, validated and probably on television just a little more. They’re reality TV contestants!

This is what makes the jury structure the best part of Survivor. It’s the antithesis of a legal jury that should be comprised of reasonable people. It’s a nightmare for the finalists who must cater to juries that are often unreadable and unwinnable. It’s so hard (for them) and so enjoyable (for us). Appealing to those bruised egos is an important Survivor skill, but we can commend those who do it well and earn votes because of it, while still acknowledging that the path to votes is not created equal.

Those hurt, imperfect jurors are elevated to a god-like status as their feelings alone decide the outcome, but I believe they can still be criticized – with limitations. While active Survivor players have the collective goal of winning, which offers an independent metric to judge their decisions against, jurors only have one metric – to vote. In that case, many feel it’s impossible to judge their vote against this broad and personal rubric, that as long as they’re voting on their own terms, they’ve ticked the box. I understand that grace but I’m not in full agreement.

For me, a player in the game can warrant armchair criticism consistently, based on if their gameplay seems to negatively or positively affect their win equity, thus furthering or detracting from their ultimate purpose. Without this affecting them, I feel jurors need that negativity to be far more glaring than any move in the game to warrant criticism. 

However, it’s hard to judge jurors’ votes positively when their explanations are inconsistent, vague or contradictory – when it feels like they’re lying to us or even to themselves. If their vote goes against objective logic, objective decency or even against their own understanding, I’m happy to condemn that the same way I might criticize a move in the game, which is, incidentally, my favourite pastime.

Another deified talking point is the idea that the jurors must know more than us, because they’re on the island and we’re on our couches. In some ways this is true and in some ways it’s not. Of course, they were there, they know how they feel and only those feelings count towards the outcome; however, we have the (edited) bird’s-eye view that they aren’t afforded. The personal, particularly subjective nature of the jury vote makes the extent of their knowledge over ours very important, but not beyond rebuke. Our different viewpoint can still highlight their myopic gaps.

Conversely, analysts may fall into the trap of not just judging these sacred votes against clear objective metrics, but simply disagreeing with the criteria, and deeming the vote as wrong due to these discrepancies. We might disagree with a social, strategic or physical emphasis, when the jurors and players decide their own values and the values of the season.

For many this recent debate came up in Survivor 46 when the jury discussed voting for who needs the money the most, which some viewers see as beyond the game. For me, and many others, this pertains to voting based on who makes fire at the final four, because I think fire-making is dumb. Nevertheless, just because we disagree with a juror’s rubric or because fire-making is stupid doesn’t mean that the vote itself is wrong or possibly even bad. I think it's always necessary and interesting to parse out these distinctions.

Culpability

A major talking point when it comes to jurors and finalists is the idea of total responsibility. Because the juror is always right, any relationship breakdown, emotional response from the juror or hard – dare I say, bitter – feelings must be the finalists’ fault. As in the transaction with the customer, it doesn’t actually matter who is at fault. It falls on the person selling their product or game. However, I think we can be more honest in our assessment of the relationship between finalist and juror, the same way we may raise an eyebrow at a belligerent consumer.

In my view, the ‘juror is always right’ mentality is so overwhelming that it stifles any discussion of the actual dynamics. Of course, the juror’s opinion materially matters to the outcome where ours does not, but that doesn’t mean we should rewrite history or ask finalists to answer to impossible undertakings.

If we extend this mentality to its extreme, this concern is evident. Jurors at their absolute worst can have inbuilt prejudices that no finalist should ever have to bear. They may have to in the game result, but our commentary shouldn’t follow suit. Think about some of the worst humans ever cast on Survivor – do we really want to put the full onus of their problematic beliefs on the finalists who outlasted them, completely above criticism? It’s clear at its extremes, but these views exist on a spectrum. Even when they’re less dangerous, the conversation should start earlier.

This doesn’t absolve the players of their missteps in the game. The social game matters, jurors feeling badly about the finalists is valid and we all know there’s usually three sides to every story, even if only one side picks who wins. Finalists have a lot to answer to, and they do to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, but attributing the totality of the blame in the breakdown of these relationships feels simplistic and often actively wrong. 

Our analysis can take them to task as a priority, but with the nuance that, while a finalist can increase or decrease their probability of receiving a vote, there are some variables that can’t be accounted for.

In Practice

It’s important, for the sake of analysis, to acknowledge that jurors can be wrong or vote badly (pick your poison), but it’s also significant for gameplay. For players, these flaws are strategic opportunities. We’ve seen some of the best final tribal council performers play to jurors’ emotions. I think finalists should actively lie. Make up a new secret sob story. Invent actions in the game. Use the jurors’ predispositions against them in how they construct their endgame and pander to the bench.

Dismissing the conversation dismisses its possibilities. If jurors can be wrong in how they think you played, or who they think you are, or how they feel about your opponents, and if none of that matters to whether your winning cheque clears, players should exploit it. 

Often murky juror votes that feel situational, inaccurate or unearned may lead to criticism of a winner. This approach can turn that judgement on its head, maximizing intentionality, and agency in the most impressive way.

In Conclusion

History is written by the jurors, but our analysis doesn’t need to be. Opening the jurors’ votes up to criticism on a scale from, if not right or wrong, at least good to bad, is fun, thought-provoking, and essential. It matters to how we evaluate and discuss the season, winner, losers, and jurors, expands the potential for gameplay and considers the lens of implicit biases and humanity that all sociological analysis should account for.

If the ultimate juror vote is irrefutable to you, that’s both the juror’s right and yours – but promise you’ll look at them side eye if you ever see them yelling at a waiter.

-Shannon

Shannon Guss lives in Australia, where she is one of the great minds in reality television strategy globally. She is a podcaster, commentator, editor, journalist, host of international Survivor coverage on RHAP, host of Talking Tribal on 10Play, and has been a production consultant on Survivor South Africa. She also appeared on the seventh season of Australia’s Next Top Model.

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