Topic > Analysis of Twelve Angry Men - 1159

Davis's method of thinking allowed him to deal with the statistical analysis of the situation. All the other jurors have fallen into a trap, described by Kahneman as the illusion of hindsight (Kahneman 202). Kahneman uses the illusion of hindsight to describe how people seem to believe they have knowledge of the past, inferring that they should be aware of how the future will go. Kahneman states that “a general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge or beliefs that have changed” (Kahneman 202). Through this quote, Kahneman introduces the idea that, even though our mind is made to contain millions of memories, they are simply a reconstruction. As far as hindsight goes, the jurors fall into the trap of using the young boy's history with his father as knowledge to construct the idea that the boy would eventually harm his father in exchange for shaming him. In the film, the boy on trial was beaten by his father every time they argued, the defendants making it seem to the jurors that the boy killed him out of revenge. According to Kahneman, neglecting statistics in various situations can lead people to believe stories rather than statistics, also described as system 1. The other jurors initially overlooked statistics. For example, at the end of the film, juror no. 9 points out that the eyewitness who supposedly saw the boy kill his father across the street had eyeglass imprints on the sides of his nose. During his testimony it was easy to believe this story if it was not analyzed through rational thought. Once juror no. 9 and Mr. Davis discussed this situation, they revealed that there is a big doubt as to whether he could have identified the boy at night without his glasses. As a result, this led all jurors to believe that there was room for