Analysis Of Twelve Angry Men

Guilty or not guilty, all citizens deserve a thorough trial to defend their rights. Formulating coherent stories about events and circumstances almost cost a young boy his life. In Twelve Angry Men, 1957, a single juror named Mr. Davis, who was initially the only one of 12 jurors to vote not guilty against an 18 year old boy accused of first degree murder, did his duty to save the life of the boy by allowing his mind to rationalize the cohesive information presented by the court and its witnesses. Mr. Davis, juror #8, convinced the other jurors’ that there was room for reasonable doubt that the boy could have killed his father by pointing out key factors of misguidance through intuitive predictions. Without rational thinking, is it safe to

Davis’ method of thinking allowed him to concern himself with the statistical analysis of the situation. All of the other jurors’ fell into a trap, described by Kahneman as the hindsight illusion (Kahneman 202). Kahneman uses the hindsight illusion to describe how people seem to believe that they have a grasp on the past, inferring that they should be aware of how the future will turn out. Kahneman says, “a general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed” (Kahneman 202). Through this quote, Kahneman is introducing the idea that even though our mind is made to hold millions of memories, they are merely a reconstruction. In regards to hindsight, the jurors’ fall into the trap of using the young boys history with his father as knowledge to construct the idea that the boy would eventually harm his father in return for shaming him. In the movie, the boy on trial was beaten by his father whenever they would get into arguments, the defendants made it seem to the people of the jury that the boy killed him for revenge. According to Kahneman, overlooking the statistics in various situations can cause people to believe stories rather than the statistics, also described as system 1. The other juror’s initially overlooked the statistics. For example, at the end of the movie juror #9 points out that the eyewitness that supposedly saw the boy kill his father from across the street had impressions from glasses on the sides of her nose. During her testimony it was easy to believe this story if it was not analyzed through rational thinking. Once juror #9 and Mr. Davis debated this situation, they revealed that there is a major doubt against whether she could have identified the boy at night without her glasses. Correspondingly, this lead all of the jurors to believe that there was room for