The Traitors, at its heart, is a game of lying and deception.

The celebrity edition of the hit BBC show began this week, and with it a murdering spree. For the first, it was Alan Carr in the kitchen with the poisoned lily.

Just as in the regular series, we find a bunch of people attempting to find out who is lying and who is telling the truth, while faced with the enormous uncertainty of being "killed" off.

On this occasion, the victim was singer Paloma Faith. She was unimpressed to be bumped off by Carr, who is her friend - or so she thought.

So why have so many viewers taken the show to their hearts, and what does it say about our human nature?

For Richard Wiseman, professor of the public understanding of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, such treachery "feels a bit like everyday life".

"You're trying to figure out which of your friends and partners and colleagues may not be entirely straight with you," he tells BBC News.

Deception, he says, "is in our DNA" as something we do from around the age of three. "As soon as children master language, they start lying," adds Prof Wiseman.

"If we were radically honest with one another all the time, then we'd probably break apart as a society fairly rapidly. So on one level, deception holds us together."

The problem, he adds, is that it can also be used in an "exploitative way", as anyone who tuned in this week to find current Celebrity Traitors Alan Carr, Cat Burns and Jonathan Ross scheming so splendlidly will testify.

"It absolutely fascinates us... you've got that microcosm, you can see all of that being played out in a rather fun way."

The hardest thing with lie detecting is knowing how people behave normally, according to Prof Wiseman, who has written about the psychology of magic and illusion, deception, luck and self-development.

"What we're quite good at is, when it's friends and partners, we know their truthful behaviour," he says. "And you're looking for people departing........

© BBC