In the BBC reality show The Celebrity Traitors, the Traitors – James Acaster, Maya Jama and King Kenny – were set an unusual challenge: murder a Faithful by making them yawn. Their plan was to bore their target into yawning, then deliver the line “Am I boring you?” to seal the murder.
The task plays on one of yawning’s strangest features: its ability to spread from one person to another. Seeing someone yawn can be enough to trigger a yawn of your own, sometimes even when you are not tired. But would the same trick work if the yawn were deliberately faked?
