The Fixation Of Prejudice In 12 Angry Men

In the Fixation of Belief, Pierce addresses the concept of truth and provides his reasoning for why he thinks that the scientific method is the most reliable and would lead to the discovery of belief. To begin with, Pierce emphasises that in order to get rid of our doubt and attain belief, we have to inquire to find an end to the irritation that occurs at the doubt stage. “Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else. On the contrary, we cling tenaciously, not merely to believing, but to believing just what we do believe” (Pierce, 4). 12 Angry Men,

Prejudice is observed on several levels throughout the course of the play. In the most obvious sense, the play deals with racial prejudice. While the race of the accused boy is never completely mentioned in the movie, we do understand that he is a minority of some sort, and this consequently becomes a heated issue among the jurors, especially for 10th juror, who refers to the young boy as “one of them”.
If we consider prejudice from a larger perspective, we find that, while maybe not racially driven, many of the jurors enter the jury room with preconceived notions and irrational ideas related to their previous experiences, jobs or relationships. The 3rd Juror seems to be prejudiced against the accused simply because of his age, which seems to remind him of his son. From a psychological point of view, Juror 3 is projecting his anger from his own son onto the accused boy, which explains why at the end he cried when he was finally convinced that the boy was guilty, it was a way of showing how these tears refer to forgiving his son. I also believe that Juror 8 is one of the examples of prejudice in an opposite way, as he was the first one who was sympathetic to the accused, not because of the available evidence, but because he pitied his poor life and troubled background. Juror 10 is a passionate person like Juror 3, but in a more prejudice way. He is convinced that the accused did it, not because of evidence presented, but because the accused grew up in the slums. This shows how he linked growing up in slums as being a bad person, which generally shows the sequence of his habits of