I remember watching 12 Angry Men few years back and being completely blown by it, I couldn’t imagine a movie being set in a single room and being so gripping in its narrative (I was hooked for the entire runtime). Now after watching it several times since, I have realized that the movie had some great insights on critical thinking
Before moving on, here is the premise of the movie: A teenage boy is put on trial for murdering his father and the decision to send him to electric chair resides with the jury consisting of 12 men
The movie starts of with an unequivocal verdict of guilty by 11 men, expect one (Henry Fonda) who has a reasonable doubt that the boy might be innocent. The core of what makes this movie exciting is argument which takes places between Henry Fonda and the rest 11. These argument exposes what, in general, people also face while making judgement: personal biases, prejudice, belief without questioning, herd opinion etc. The movie makes us ponder over one critical question: How does one make judgement?
During the entire trial, it is clear that the way prosecution formed the narrative with the evidence easily pointed that the boy was the murderer but here Henry Fonda comes up and gives another perspective to the evidence. Now, this brings up an important question: how do we tell different stories with the same underlying facts? How much weight (importance) we give to different stories built on same facts? This points to a concept brought up by Nassim Taleb in his book, The Black Swan, called the narrative fallacy, which says in a nutshell, our brain tends to look for a more coherent and simple story for it to make sense and tries to avoid too much questioning (well because it’s too tiring to question everything but easy for us to consume an already made up good story). In the movie too, the jury members were so convinced that boy was guilty because the story perfectly lined up and made complete sense, but then again, Henry Fonda reminds us that there are always two ways of looking at the same thing and questioning might leads us to new perspective
Every jury member represents a flaw in our decision making. There is a one bunch who is highly prejudiced, there is another bunch who goes with the herd opinion, another who are not willing to hear a new perspective. Can we be entirely objective while making a judgement? Can we really be self aware of our biases while thinking through the judgement?
