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12 Men

Running Head: 12 Angry Men

12 Angry Men and Social Psychology Concepts
University of Houston

12 Angry men is a story that takes place in the late 1950’s in New York City and is based on the trial of a tenement-dwelling Puerto Rican teenager. The child is on trial for murder after being accused of stabbing his father to death. The twelve man jury that is brought together is going to decide the fate of the boy and ultimately make the final decision if they will send him to the electric chair. The jury is composed of 12 all white males who because of personal differences and prejudices don’t really take into considerations the actual facts of the case and want to just jump to the conclusion that the boy is guilty. Fortunately one juror, juror 8, who is played by Henry Fonda, makes the only dissenting vote that the boy could be innocent based on the fact that there is a reasonable doubt. As Fonda tries to persuade the weary jurors to re-examine the evidence, we begin to get the actual feelings of each of the other jurors (Rose, 1957).
Juror 3 is a bullying self-made man which has estranged himself from his own son and that causes him to be hateful and hostile toward all young people. The extroverted Juror 7 has an ingrained mistrust of foreigners and lacks complete human concern for the defendant and for the immigrant juror. Juror 6 is more of a follower and has difficulty in making up his own mind. Jurors 10 and 11 are so certain of the infallibility of the law that they assume that if the boy was arrested, he must be guilty. They segregate the world into us and them. Juror 4 is an advocate of dispassionate deductive reasoning and possesses an incredible recall and grasp of the facts of the case. Juror 5 grew up in a poor Jewish neighborhood and the case relived in his mind his slum-dwelling upbringing and was sure that a guilty vote would distance him from his past. Juror 12 is an advertising man who doesn't understand anything that he can't package and...