Group Conformity In The Film '12 Angry Men' By Asch

Conformity in psychology is when the group influence is so strong that it will cause a person to change their thinking to match the group. This social construct has been studied in depth by Asch in his famous line drawing study. In this study, there was a group of people who were asked a question about which line on a card, that had three total lines, matched in size to a line on another card. The answers to these questions tended to be fairly obvious to which the right answer was. Although there would be a large group of people in a room answering these questions at the same time, all but one of the people would be confederates. This made it so that the experiment could focus on one person’s answer in comparison to a group where the researchers

When the group was voting for the first time by raising their hand in an open vote there were quite a few hands that went up really fast and then others that were slower to go up. This can be interpreted as group conformity. As more and more hands were voting in favor of guilty, there were a few hands that were slowly going up. Specifically, these were the hands of the old man (juror #9) and juror #5 (the man who grew up in the project). These hands went up as they saw more hands going up because they did not want to be the odd man out and stick out to the other men. They conformed to the group even though their own beliefs and ideas did not support voting for the defendant to be guilty. It becomes more clear they their beliefs did not lie on the side of the man being guilty seeing ask though when given the chance to switch their vote they were very quick to change their vote; with the old man being the first to change his vote and then juror 5 being the second person to change his vote. Asch’s line drawing study can also be used to explain why once the old man changed his vote it became easier for everyone else to change their