Group Processes: 12 Angry Men

Group Processes: 12 Angry Men

The movie 12 Angry Men may be one of the most comprehensive studies of group processes in the history of American cinema. Most people are familiar with the film: 12 men are convened to sit on a jury in order to determine the fate of a young Hispanic male who is accused of murdering his father. All of the men are white males, which was representative of a jury at that time period, but certainly reflected a lack of diversity in many ways. The most significant lack of diversity may have been reflected in their very basic differences from the defendant whose fate they were judging. What is most interesting about the film is how it exemplifies what is known about group sampling.

At the beginning of the movie, one of the first thing that is noticeable is that the jurors all engage in biased sampling. Biased sampling refers to the tendency for groups to spend more time discussing shared information than unshared information. When the jury deliberations begin, the jurors are discussing the shared information that they have. This shared information has led six of them to the same conclusion, which is that the defendant is guilty of the murder of his father.

This biased sampling also leads to the phenomenon of group polarization. Taking the initial vote as an example, one sees how people use the initial tendencies of the group, which is a strong leaning towards finding the defendant guilty, are exacerbated even in the initial vote. In the first vote, six men initially put their hands up, which suggests that only half of them are strongly convinced of their position. However, as people began to see how others were voting, more of the jurors began to raise their hands, so that each vote helped further polarize the jury and move it towards a position. Furthermore, as each of the eleven jurors who were initially convinced of the defendant's guilt explained his position, the explanations strengthened the idea that the defendant was guilty and further polarized the group. By the time that Henry Fonda's character, the lone initial dissenter, explained his position, he was well outside of the normative parameters that had already been established by the group, even though the movie made it clear that only about half of the jurors were strongly convinced of the defendant's guilt at the beginning of the film.

In some ways, this could even be described as a form of groupthink. Generally, groupthink refers to "A group decision-making style characterized by an excessive tendency among group members to seek concurrence" (Kassin et al., 2010). The members of the jury are certainly attempting to reach concurrence. However, it may be erroneous to describe their behavior as groupthink. After all, a jury functions differently than other groups in that a jury is tasked with making a unanimous decision in ways that other groups simply are not. As a result, whether it is appropriate to look at a jury's decision-making process as a result of groupthink is debatable. However, it is clear that the jury process encourages the group members to engage in a groupthink manner because of the pressure to come to a unanimous decision.

Groupthink becomes apparent in a variety of different contexts in the film. It is critical to remember that the jury is composed of 12 white men and that the defendant is a member of a minority. As a result, the groupthink is revealed in alarmingly prejudiced ways, with one of the jurors dismissing the defendant as a "slum kid," a sentiment that appears to be shared by many of the other jurors. It becomes clear that one of the reasons that they are willing to believe in the defendant's guilt is that he is different from them. This is an example of devindividuation. First, rather than acting as individuals, the eleven jurors are acting as a group. This causes them to lose some of their social constraints and act in ways that are considered deviant. Although racism was more acceptable during that time period, there was still some social taboo against suggesting that the defendant was guilty simply because he was Hispanic and poor. Furthermore, the fact that so many of the jury members are willing to think that he is guilty because of his group membership rather than his individual characteristics

It is also important to understand the impact of the time deadline on the jurors. Juries do not have unlimited time in which to make a decision. However, much of the time constraint is imposed by the jurors, themselves, because they want to make a decision so that they can get be finished with jury duty and be able to move on with their lives. This creates a type of false pressure. Connie Gersick helped explain how time deadlines impacted the group process by the development of a punctuated equilibrium model that suggests that "groups go through periods of inertia or relative inactivity until triggered by awareness of time and deadlines, which can cause a sudden shift in activity and deadlines" (Kassin et al., 2010). One can see this displayed several times throughout the movie, most notably when the jurors ask about the time and find that is already after 6 p.m.