Survivor is a reality TV game where contestants compete through a series of vote-outs until one is crowned the Sole Survivor.
It's pretty straightforward — players need to:
Play games to win immunity.
Use strategy to convince players to not vote them out.
Don't get voted out — and make it to the end.
Take Season 18: Tocantins for example.
We start with 16 players on Day 1.
After 6 tribe-based voteouts, 10 make it to the next stage of the game, called the Merge.
Our finale has 2 players remaining. J.T. Thomas and Stephen Fishbach face the jury.
Leading to J.T. pulling off an impressive sweep.
We can visualize any season of Survivor this way.
Give it a shot:
You may have noticed something — there aren't many people of color in these seasons. This isn't just an issue with casting - let's look at how biases can manifest in player behavior during the game.
For each season, we can look at how players are targeted in the pre-merge.
The bars show the difference between BIPOC share of votes received vs. BIPOC share of the eligible pool. If the bar is positive, that means people of color were over-targeted .
For seasons 21–30, players of color were especially targeted at rates above what we'd expect.
Casting choices and voting patterns weren't going unnoticed.
There was pressure from fans and alumni to make changes to the game.
There are more people of color participating in the later seasons — at every stage of the game.
But the bigger question — did casting more players of color actually change the game?
In the newest seasons, the pattern was undone — players of color were no longer over-targeted in pre-merge votes. But with only 9 seasons of post-mandate data, the picture is still uncertain.
The diversity mandate reshaped Survivor's cast almost overnight. But when talking about diversity, it's important to look at more than just race. Let's take a closer look at who gets cast in the new era.
Players in recent seasons fall into a narrower age band than in earlier eras — winners cluster tightly between 20–35, with Yam Yam (36) and Gabler (52) as the outlying exceptions.
We can also look at diversity of income — using listed occupations and hometowns, we can estimate players' wages using BLS data.
Let's look at how estimated incomes have shifted across seasons.
Inflation accounts for some of this, but the gap is too wide to explain entirely.
The new Survivor cast may be more racially diverse, but the players also have occupations that tend to have higher incomes compared to older seasons.
So — did Survivor fix the diversity problem?
Survivor's diversity problem was never just about casting. For decades, players of color were voted out at rates that exceeded what their numbers alone would predict. When CBS mandated 50% representation, the racial makeup of the cast changed — but the players who filled those spots increasingly came from a narrower demographic slice: younger, wealthier, more alike in background if not in race.
The best thing about Survivor is that it's willing to change and grow. Hopefully as more fans talk about how homogenous some of the players feel, producers will complement racial diversity with diversity in background and experience. Because as Jeff Probst has said — this show is the ultimate study of human behavior.