12 Angry Men Jury Duty

Everyone dreads Jury duty. Jury duty is commonly known as a nuisance that gets in the way of our everyday lives. When one types in the words “jury duty” into the google search bar that individual finds the first few search results to be “get out of jury duty” or “jury duty excuses”. However, we fail to realize that the role of a juror is essential to the United States justice system, we also fail to realize that every single juror counts. We often hear of jurors conforming, and switching their votes to the majority vote in hopes of going home, but this is not the case in “12 Angry Men”. In Sidney Lumet’s feature film “12 Angry Men”, we are given insight to the pressures of social psychology and how one man strives to overcome and change it.
This phenomenon is what is known as the confirmation bias. Psychologists define confirmation bias as a person’s tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms to one’s preconceptions, this in return leads to statistical errors. Due to the belief that the defendant was guilty, the 11 jurors who had submitted their vote as guilty were not impartial. The 11 jurors who had casted their vote as guilty paid no attention to the possibility of reasonable doubt. For example, juror 10 displays prejudice towards people that live in the slums. He said adamantly, “You can’t believe a word they say.” However, when it came to the witness that confirmed his beliefs, he blindly believed the lady because “she swore she saw him do it.” Juror 10 had already made up his mind far before the deliberations even started. This lead to confirmation bias towards the
Psychologist Solomon Asch defines conformity as the changing of beliefs due to either the real or the imagined pressures exerted on an individual by the ones around them. Normative and informational influences are two ways that convinced the jurors’ 7 and 4 to conform. Normative influence is defined as the influence that directs us to conforming in order to be accepted by the group. In other words, we go along to get along. An example of this was when juror 7 had switched his vote after the majority of votes became “not guilty.” Juror 7 did not have his own insight nor his own reason as to why he thought the defendant should be deemed “not guilty.” Normative influence often leads to compliance, to act in accordance with the wishes of others even though you aren’t in agreement. When juror 7 was confronted and asked for the reason why he had changed his vote, he said quietly, “I … don’t think … he’s guilty.” Juror 7 did not believe that the defendant was “not guilty”, he simply went along with the group despite his belief. In short, juror 7 changed his vote due to imagined pressure from the other jurors.The opposite of normative influence, informational influence is also displayed in this