Examples Of Critical Thinking In 12 Angry Men

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In the film “12 Angry Men”, several critical thinking skills are imposed in attempts to persuade the members of the jury to believe that the suspect is guilty or not guilty. To begin with, the word choice used in the film seems to be ambiguous in which the words used could have two completely different meanings. For example, a juror in the movie believes that the suspect is guilty all because he claims that “the way they are by nature” or “they are all alike”. This phrase is very vague without having a clear definition, meaning that it can be misinterpreted by others. These faulty statements don’t prove a point in regards to finding whether or not the defendant is guilty, as it is misleading. Furthermore, these statements are completely overgeneralizing …show more content…

A decent critical thinking statement in the film is “How come you believe the woman’s story rather than the boy’s story”. This statement questions the potential bias of the person the speaker is questioning. This is a good critical thinking skill of identifying biases that questions the information provided. However, there exists multiple incorrectly used critical thinking statements in the film that imply that the suspect is guilty such as “The woman saw him do it” and “The kids guilty, What else?”. The first statement is an assumption that the suspect committed the crime, all because someone believed that they saw him committing the murder. This is a problem in which it is possible that we can make mistakes with our own observations, making the testimony of an individual witness not always viable in terms of critical thinking. The second statement on the other hand is a poor inference that concludes that the defendant is guilty without considering all the evidence that exists. Altogether, this film has several critical thinking statements that are both used correctly and

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