12 Angry Men does a good job of exploring issues in the court system from the 1950s that are still relevant today. From impatient or prejudiced jurors to unmotivated attorneys and false or misleading witness testimonies, there are many potential points of failure in a court case beyond the collection of evidence.

I had not previously considered that jury duty might include investigation and instead thought it was about a more passive absorption of arguments presented in court followed by a vote. While the characters in the film treated it that way at first, the situation quickly evolved into a full and thorough reexamination of all the evidence. I was a little confused before how juries could sometimes takes several hours to come to a decision, but this explains that.

I also noticed some phenomena in the film that remind me of my social psychology class. Throughout the film, the jurors’ judgements are clearly affected by those of others. In the first vote, two or three jurors clearly voted guilty after seeing that everyone else was, and the last holdout for a guilty verdict clearly felt pressure from being alone in that view. The jurors also exhibited confirmation bias when they did not notice the marks indicating that the woman witness wears glasses. Rather than looking for the disconfirming evidence calling her testimony into question, they focused on the presence of apparently confirming evidence that the defendant was guilty.

Overall, I enjoyed the film and I can see why it is so highly rated.