12 Angry Men Stereotypes

The 1957 film 12 Angry Men is a classic courtroom drama that continues to captivate audiences today. The film's plot revolves around twelve jurors tasked with deciding the fate of a young man accused of murder. As the deliberations unfold, the jurors' personal biases and prejudices come to light, leading to intense debates. The film also highlights the dangers of relying solely on eyewitness testimony, as memories can be faulty and subject to encoding, storage, and retrieval errors. We get a taste of some of the juror’s biases right off the bat. As the men gather in the deliberation room, one man declares that he votes for a guilty verdict saying, “Can’t believe a word they say. They’re born liars” (Lumet, 1957). The audience picks up that

Sometimes they are the result of ethnocentrism, the tendency to believe that one’s own culture or social group is better than others. Scholars theorize that this type of worldview is a result of a “biological survival mechanism inducing us to favor our own family, tribe, or race and to protect our tribe from external threat” (Aronson et al., 2019). Ethnocentrism comes from a need for social identity and, according to social identity theory, can result in an “us versus them” attitude. For some people to maintain their sense of pride in their culture, religion, or social group, they respond to threats to their social identity by forming strong negative attitudes toward and a dislike for other groups (Grant, 1992). The “us versus them” mentality is an in-group bias, where people give preference to members of their in-group, often leading to unfair treatment of members of an out-group. Ethnocentrism is illustrated in 12 Angry Men when a juror responds to another’s comment that the defendant is a bright young man, “Bright? He’s a common ignorant slob. He don’t even speak good English” (Lumet, 1957). Here he is expressing a stereotype and his dislike of a member of an out-group and his preference for his own