Is it Reality TV or is it Science? (Expert Article)

Is it Reality TV or is it Science?

How Love Island Behaves like a Psychological Experiment

We watch it for the drama. We watch it for the romance. We watch it for the psychology? Wait a minute, this is Love Island we’re talking about. For the readers who are not familiar with the world famous series, don’t worry. I am a self-proclaimed Love Island expert, having watched all 11 seasons of Love Island UK and most of Love Island USA, and I’ll break it down for you.

It seems rather simple: stay in a couple, make the viewers like you, and win the cash prize. However, isolation and manipulation, which I’ll get into throughout the article, make it so much more complex than that. Love Island is not a simple dating show. It is a full throttle psychological experiment, and I am going to tell you why. I will define what a typical psychological behavioral experiment looks like, and I will show how Love Island fits all of those criteria. Before we get into it, there is key Love Island language that you must know in order to understand the remainder of this article:

Islander – a contestant on the show. 

The villa (or the island) – the house in which the contestants reside during the show.

Recoupling ceremony – the event in which contestants are given the choice to stay in their couple, or choose a new person to couple up with. Some contestants may be left single. 

Now that we have our definitions in place, I’ll give a brief overview of the plot line. Five men and five women enter the villa and are paired up as couples. As the premise of the show is to find love, being single is the biggest threat to a contestant’s success on Love Island. New islanders, games, and dates pose the greatest challenge to a couple’s successful relationship. Recoupling ceremonies occur randomly, at which the single islanders are often removed from the villa. At the end of the show, the public gets to vote for their favorite remaining couple to win a $100,000 cash prize. 

Psychology

Experimental psychology is the scientific study of behavior, motives, or cognition in a laboratory or other controlled setting in order to predict, explain, or influence behavior or other psychological phenomena. This definition follows the standard procedure of scientific research: independent variables are manipulated in a controlled environment. Love Island follows this scientific protocol through having a controlled setting and manipulations of the environment. The production team does this in order to influence behavior of the islanders and make “good TV”. 

There are many aspects of the show that contribute to an isolated and controlled environment for the islanders. 

• Pre-isolation

• Outside contact

• Isolation from reality

Pre-Isolation

Two weeks prior to the beginning of the show, contestants are flown to the destination. There, they stay alone in a hotel, and are not able to leave the hotel property or to interact with anyone outside of Love Island staff and producers. Islanders are not notified of when, or even if, they will be entering the villa to start the show. Popular Season 6 love island contestant Leah Kateb shared her opinion on this pre-villa experience on the popular podcast Call Her Daddy, stating she felt so isolated and anxious she almost left before filming even started.

Outside Contact

Once the islanders enter the villa, a good amount of their personal belongings are confiscated, including their phones and other technological devices. This is done in order to remove any contact to anything outside of the villa. Islanders are not able to communicate with their friends and family for the time they are on the show. They also have no access to social media or news outlets. This creates a unique isolation and controlled environment. With no access to outside sources, they have no idea how they are being portrayed on the show. They also have no contact with any of their support systems, like friends and family, who would typically help them through stressful circumstances.

Isolation from Reality

Once islanders enter the villa, they very rarely leave. The only occasion that an islander is able to leave the villa is for a date, and generally an islander will go on a maximum of 3 dates per season. This means that over the course of two months, these contestants only leave the house 3 times. Islanders are also given phones upon entering the villa used primarily for communication from the producers. Chris Williamson of Love Island UK season 1, shared some of the unique things that came from this. He said that all phones and clocks throughout the villa showed different dates and times. On the rare occasions that islanders would leave the villa for a date, their driver would have a completely different time set in their car. 

That was a lot of Love Island lore. Now, let's remind ourselves of what psychological experimentation is: the study of behavior in a controlled setting in order to predict, explain, or influence behavior. We’ve discussed the controlled setting aspect of the show: the islanders are fully isolated from society and are stuck in a villa for two months. It is also clear that the producers do this isolating in order to influence contestant behavior. That is where manipulation comes into play.

The isolation tactics I described above contribute to a lot of this manipulation. Because the islanders have no concept of time, they have no way of judging what events should come next. Even within the more standard events like recouplings, no two ceremonies are the same. In some ceremonies, no islander is sent home. In others, multiple couples are sent home and the fellow islanders are forced to choose who. The islanders never know who, if any new contestant, is going to enter the villa next. Every day is a surprise to the islanders, and they never know what will happen next. To top it all off, because of their isolation and removal from society, they have nothing to do but sit around and worry about what could possibly happen next. This consistent worry, anxiety, and insecurity about their circumstances, alongside their isolation from society can create significant changes in the islanders’ characters. 

If a PHD in psychology decided to study Love Island they would likely learn a lot about human behavior. Unfortunately, the main reason for the isolation and manipulation is to create exciting television. A lot of the reason people watch the show is because we never know what will happen next, and also that many of the islanders act crazy. The producers know that insecurity changes the behavior of the contestants. Season 6 star, Leah Kateb, shared on Call Her Daddy that she often had to visit the on set psychiatrist multiple times a day due to how the show was affecting her behavior. While the purpose of the manipulation on Love Island is primarily for entertainment, we can learn a lot from the show about behavior, and it is easy to see how similar it is the a psychological experiment.

American Psychological Association. (n.d.). Apa Dictionary of Psychology. American Psychological Association. https://dictionary.apa.org/experimental-psychology

BBC. (2019, June 4). Love island: Secrets from a former contestant. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-48461900

Cooper, A (Host). (2024, July 25). Leah's Love Island Tell All [Video podcast episode]. In Call Her Daddy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9HAk-StPeA