Earlier today I watched 12 Angry Men, and I now know why it’s such a highly rated movie. There’s way too much in the movie to write about in general, so I’d like to mention in specific the personalities of the characters.

I think this movie does an amazing job of displaying how people make and are invested in decisions. If psychology has taught us anything, its that people have a hard time deciding things based on “objective” facts: people are very attached to ideologies. In fact, proving someone wrong may make them dig in their heels (https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/12/vaccine-myth-busting-can-backfire/383700/

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds).

So it was particularly fascinating to watch the jurors slowly be convinced that the defendant was innocent. At least two of them were clearly prejudiced from prior experiences (one of them had a traumatic experience with his own son, and the other was just prejudiced against poor kids in general). Another seemed initially to be the most invested in his view, but quickly changed his mind when he saw the tide turning, more concerned about attending a baseball game than deliberating over a mans life. I saw facets of people I knew from high school, family members, old friends inside each one of these men. The brilliance of the film is that it could have been about anything: the fact that it was about a trial was almost irrelevant. What mattered was how people decided on their views, and how they handled being proven wrong.

The lesson I took away from this is to be constantly vigilant in talking with people and forming opinions. The amount of our beliefs that come from anything that could be called “objective” or a “fact” is much smaller than we would like to think. The stakes are rarely so high, but the phenomena arise just the same.