Conformity and Group Influence in Twelve Angry Men

According to the book, conformity tends to happen when you have a small group of people who conform to a decision. This conformity can influence a change in behavior or a belief as a result of the group pressure. After watching the twelve angry men, I was able to witness how one man is able to convince the rest of the jury that the accused man who is waiting for his sentence, is not guilty and that the evidence given by the court was not sufficient enough to declare him guilty for the crime that he had committed. In this movie, I was able to identify four elements of conformity those being group size, unanimity, cohesiveness and the public response.

One major element of conformity that I think played a role in this movie was the group size

of the jury. For example, in the begging of the movie it was determine by the majority of the jurors that the accused man was guilty for stabbing his dad and that the evidence that was presented in court was sufficient enough to determine their verdict. However, there was only one man out of the twelve that thought that the accused man was innocent. Yet, it was not until they started to examine every detail of the case that many of the jurors began to change their decision about convicting the man as guilty. By the end of the movie, the twelve men had conform to the idea that the man accused for stabbing his dad in the chest was more innocent that guilty.

Another element of conformity that played a role in the verdict of the trial was the unanimity of the group.

For instance, at the beginning of this movie, 11 men except one believed that that the accused man was guilty just because he had killed his dad. But as they analyzed each evidence and each testimony, the jury started to believe that the accused man was innocent as there were many factors that did not fit in with what the witnesses had said during the trial. For example, in the movie the jury argued that the old man’s testimony was not very accurate with the time of the stabbing because it was impossible for him to get up from his bed to the front door of his apartment with in 15 seconds considering his age and health condition. They also question the distance at which the woman admits seeing the victim being stab by his son, as it was implied that she must have not been wearing her glasses by the time she witness the crime.

Cohesiveness also played a role in the verdict of the trial, because at the begging of the movie the majority of the group wanted to convict man as guilty, even the ones who were not sure of his innocence. In one of the scenes of the movie a older man asks another if they had seen the women rubbing her nose while she was in the stand.
they examined each detail of the case they either change their vote or were more sure that the men being convicted was more innocent that

guilty.

The last element conformity that I believed had an effect on the verdict of the trial was the public response and the opinions of each juror. For example, whenever a juror changed his vote from guilty to not guilty, the other jurors asked him why he believed that the accused was not guilty of the crime. The juror’s response was then back up by his opinions and by other facts that he thought were relevant to the case. In addition to this, the juror’s responses also influence the other men to change their votes, as they now were able to question every little detail of the case that was at the beginning irrelevant to their decision.