Flailing

   verb: flail
   1. wave or swing or cause to wave or swing wildly.
   "his arms were flailing helplessly"
   synonyms:	wave, swing, thrash about, flap about

Flailing in Mafia can be defined as communication in response to the possibility of being lynched that conveys a sense of wild helplessness.

Players regularly identify flailing behavior in others who have many votes placed against them. One study found 101 unique accusations of flailing occurring in as few as 35 Large Normal Games.

"It's basically when a person who is in trouble starts posting things that don't make sense, trying to say anything to muddy the waters or get them out of trouble, starts making serious errors in logic and reasoning, ect, basically a last-chance "baffle with bullshit" attempt. Doing that has always been considered scummy, it's just the word that's new." - Yosarian2

Flailing as a Scumtell

In 2012 Psyche began an investigation into the efficacy of the flailing scumtell by evaluating the 101 most recent accusations of flailing in Large Normal games (excluding ongoings). The product attempted to answer the question, "When players are accused of flailing, how often are these players scum?"

The data shows that if players were killed at random in the studied games, scum would've died 25.76% of the time. If, instead, players who were identified as flailing were killed at random, scum would've died 28.71% of the time. If the pool is limited to players who were identified by town as flailing (which may be a more fair show of the value of the tell in some sense) scum die 34.92% of the time.

If players accusing others of flailing were were killed at random, 34.65% of those killed would be scum. That's a little less than the "players who were identified by town as flailing" rate: —8.89%. Constrain it to "players accusing town of flailing", though, and the strongest tell of the study is produced — 42.25% of deaths are scum deaths.

The implications of this for scumhunting aren't clear. Popular distinctions between "scummy" flailing and "town" flailing abound, though these conceptions have not developed clearly enough to be studied.

Flailing as a Signal that Pressure Has Done Its Job

" 'X is flailing' is quite a useful thing to acknowledge in thread, even tho it's not per se, I don't think, an argument that I'd use to demonstrate that someone is scum. The point when it starts being recognised that X is flailing is the point when further pressure will likely produce little extra in the way of useful information about their alignment (just more flailing). I'd be willing to argue that once a player has started flailing, continuing to flail is a nulltell. IE, once a player starts flailing, the pressure has done its job, and you should only be still voting if you're convinced you'd be happy to lynch that player right now. " - The Fonz