12 Angry Men Essay

In the movie Twelve Angry Men, tells the story of an ongoing debate within a jury whether to find the defendant guilty or not for murdering his father. While watching the movie, I couldn’t help but realize that there was a lot of techniques used by the juries and lawyers to sway the vote in either directions. I was able analyze the movie using social psychology as my main tool. I could relate the movie to the topic of social psychology by comparing it to Asch’s experiment and the act of conformity and the act of persuasion.

In class, we learned about Asch’s conformity studies and how people tend to yield to the group surrounding/ and or majority of the group, and this experiment was done through the line test. In the movie, they jury first

votes verbally. The vote ends out 11 to 1 for guilty to not guilty. I feel like this is the outcome due to social pressure. Some of the men in the jury could have possibly thought the boy wasn’t guilty but because everyone before them was saying guilty, guilty, guilty so there was a uncomfortable feeling that if they were to disagree, they would stand out. Also within the Asch’s experiment, it was also found that when people have the choice to vote by paper or anomalously, there was a greater diversity in responses than when they were all verbal. I find this experiment relative to Twelve Angry Men because it was not till the only gentlemen (juror 8) that voted the defendant not guilty started explaining his reasoning and beliefs on the topic and questioning the evidence, where things started getting hectic and men started debating with each other. It is then suggested that the jury votes by paper making the vote anonymous, they find the count if no longer 11 to 1, there is another ‘not guilty’ vote. This is an example of social pressure. When in a group setting as such in the movie, people tend to go with most of the group mainly because people don’t want to stand out and people sometimes believe the group is better informed than they are. This applies to the movie because juror 12 was being aggressive and confronting anything and everything going against the defendant being guilty so the other jurors probably felt that if they verbal voiced their change in opinion, they would get juror’s 12 backlash as well.
The movie also presents acts of persuasion.

Throughout the movie, there are a numerous types of persuasion techniques are used both effective and ineffective. One is the use of stereotypes to try to win over the votes. Saying this such as “Slums in the breeding ground for criminals” literally claiming that he must be guilty just because of where he is from. An example of an effective method of persuasion used is when juror 8 started contemplating the old man’s witness testimony and the hearing of the yelling while the load un bearable train is going by. Also about the old man’s testimony about him running to the front door through a 40 + feet hallway in about 15 seconds. Juror 8 demonstrated the old man walking down the hall and having another juror time this demonstration to prove his point and to convince the other jurors that this was indeed not possible. Another example of persuasion is when juror 8 pulls out the exact same pocket knife that was used for the murder to show the rest of the jury that it is possible that the boy was telling the truth about the knife. Even juror 12 tried to persuade the jury to somewhat sympathize for him and to still vote for the defendant guilty by talking about his own relationship with his own son. Of course, there are many more examples throughout the movie but after all these different acts of persuasion were performed you do see jurors start to doubt their original perspective.

The movie the Twelve Angry Men is an excellent movie to

go along with the current chapters of obedience, conformity and persuasion. It is because of the social psychology class that I can examine and analyze this movie in a constructive and analytics way. I can study the human to human interactions in the movie and be able to recognize and relate them back to things learned in class.