12 Angry Men Psychology

The film "12 Angry Men", involves many social psychology concepts. In this report, I explain my understanding of this film from a social psychological (PSYCHO 241) standpoint. Firstly, 11/12 jurors acted as cognitive misers, leading to heuristic thinking due to a lack of time, importance, and information. These men used the representative heuristic by utilizing their schema of "slum kids" as a prototype. They also used the availability heuristic as media portrays these children in a bad light. Ultimately, this led to confirmation bias as the jurors expected that the boy must be guilty due to their stereotype/prejudice towards "slum kids" and so they only remembered details that supported this. Alternatively, the opposed juror (juror #8) acted
Juror #8, the naive scientist, made external attributions by taking into account the boy's upbringing. The 11 other jurors, initially, made internal attributions. They believed the boy murdered his father because he is a "slum kid" and all of them are inherently, bad kids. Later in the movie, the actor-observer bias is seen when one juror says "I'm going to kill you" to juror #8, but didn't mean it. This is unlike his previous belief that the son (in trial) must have meant it when saying it to his father. Furthermore, the fundamental attribution error is evident when one juror can't remember the movies he saw, under no emotional distress, unlike the boy under
Not surprisingly, since this film takes place in America, juror #8 does not conform in the first vote. So, an interesting question would be: "Is this film plot plausible in Eastern Asian (Interdependent) cultures?". From what I have learned in class, my answer would be no. These cultures put pressure on people to conform to the majority, leading to less creativity and/or originality. Furthermore, I was able to observe group psychology concepts. The jurors are a homogeneous group of white men, and groupthink states that the more cohesive a group is, the greater the pressure is to conform. At the start, the jurors, except for juror #8, censored their self thoughts. Interestingly, minority influence is evident as juror #8 influenced the majority as more men chose "not guilty". Juror #8 was consistent/confident, and knew important facts that other jurors didn't. For example, the moving train calculations and that the knife wasn't uncommon. In conclusion, this film is an excellent example of the how social psychology theories and concepts manifest our social situations and the how we respond to