How to psychologically deduce who the impostors are in public lobbies?

I've been playing the game from 2020 but haven't come across something like this before so I decided to make this post. Clearing crewmates through visual tasks and then voting off those who are sus and winning is cool but reduces the fun drastically because the game isn't as psychological. The real fun is experienced when visual tasks are off and the game is slightly skewed towards the impostors. So how do you win as a crewmate in these types of games?

Firstly, if visual tasks are off there's no way to be 100% certain if someone is a crewmate or an impostor if there are multiple impostors. So whenever you vote, you'll have to determine which way the probability is skewed towards. There's always a chance you're wrong but that's what the game is about. It's about manipulation, trust, deceit and lots of unverified information floating. With that being said here is how it's possible to psychologically deduce who the impostors are.

  1. If someone voluntarily presses an emergency and doesn't report a dead body, there's a high probability that they are a fellow crewmate. Think about it from the perspective of the impostor. Why would you voluntarily attract attention towards yourself if your goal is to eliminate everyone without being caught? You wouldn't. But a crewmate who is actively trying to find the impostor is would want to obtain information and share information. A crewmate's goal is always to obtain as much reliable information as possible to eliminate the impostor while the impostor's goal is to prevent the information from being shared.

  2. If an impostor chats there's a good probability the chat could look like this. Let's say someone accuses red of being an impostor and green writes " so red?". There's a good probability that green is an impostor. Don't immediately vote green off but keep an eye on them. Impostors have to lie and making up a complicated lie isn't that easy for the brain. However some impostors feel not chatting would make them fall under suspicion so they write stuff that doesn't meaningfully contribute towards the discussion and feels invalid. You might have noticed that some people write " where?" , " So navigation?" even after someone clearly mentions the location of a body. Keep an eye on these people.

  3. Usually a culprit is defensive while an innocent person is assertive. If someone is accused and the accuser says they watched them kill and they still ask " yeah but where is the proof?" there's a good probability that the accuser is right. From my personal experience if an innocent is accused they become assertive and aggressively deny the accusation. They might write something like " Ok so vote me off idiots. You're all losers". An impostor isn't being wrongly accused so they wouldn't type so angrily.

  4. This one is obvious and many people would already know but impostors generally change directions too frequently. They enter a room and then exit it without doing any task and travel the whole map multiple times and sometimes without doing anything. As an impostor your goal is more diluted. You have to kill people but should make sure no one should know so you might have to change your decisions frequently which will reflect your movements. Some impostors are good so they won't do this and some people just don't know how to use their device properly so this alone shouldn't be enough to deduce who the impostor is.

  5. There are some impostors who can't be caught using the above methods because they actively try to imitate a crewmate. They participate in the discussions to actively find the impostor, fake tasks very well and don't change directions frequently when moving. Even these guys can be caught using proper observation. Most of them try to lead the discussion but don't particularly accuse someone. Instead they support false accusations. If someone accused someone else and they stealthily lead the conversation in favour of the accuser, they are probably the impostor. It will be hard to deduce these type of people initially but with enough experience it's totally doable.

The above methods should only help you skew the probability towards a certain side. They are not 100% accurate. It's possible that you apply these methods and they fail. However they will succeed a lot more times. From my experience these methods are successfully around 70% of the time. If someone is too dumb or too smart some of these methods won't apply. They will be highly successfully in cases where the impostor is not too smart but isn't too dumb either.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/AmongUs/comments/uws2oq/how_to_psychologically_deduce_who_the_impostors/

leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *