It's not clear to me the behaviour isn't fairly rational. It only seems irrational because the host tells the audience that the faithful are supposed to be finding traitors -- but they arent. Not at all. They're each aiming to win. Eliminating faithful is a necessary and prudent step.

Indeed, traitors have almost all of the power -- the ideal strategy as a faithful is to eliminate talented faithful and ally or sus-out for oneself who the traitors are.

In this light, any faithful expressing actual out-loud competence is a target for everyone, esp. other faithful.

It seem to me a good strategy is to play dumb, pretend to be confused that a competitor-faithful is a traitor, and target them.