The 1957 film 12 Angry Men provides an example of how team members interact and struggle towards a unanimous decision. Its director, Sidney Lumet, guides us through personal and social conflicts to reveal the sometimes ugly process through which this happens. This brief analysis quantitatively examines the level of interaction and somewhat subjectively, the content of those interactions. For example, direct communication was tracked between the jurors but also whether comments were encouragements or interruptions. For readability all jurors are referred to by actor name. For the full list of actors and their juror numbers, refer to Table 1.

To illustrate communication levels a sociograph can provide insights such as the most frequent and least frequent participants in a team. The resulting data for the movie is presented in tabular and graphical formats. It is important to note that these graphs do not show communication as a function of time.

• The data in Table 1 is the quantitative results of each juror’s communication with the other eleven on the jury. To read the table you find the juror number or actor name of interest, then, to see how many times he communicated with the other jurors, move to the corresponding column. For example, to see how many times Jack Warden talked to Henry Fonda, read from row seven and column eight. Each row also indicates the total number of encouragements (ENCOR), interruptions (INTER), and group (GROUP) communications for each juror.
• Figure 1 displays the communications of each juror based on 100% of his own communications. To read the sociograph, find the actor name or juror number of interest on the vertical axis; scan across to the bar of interest, then find the color that corresponds to the juror on the legend. For example, to see who Henry Fonda talks to the most, go to the bottom bar, read across to the bar that has the greatest number (32) and find the corresponding color on the legend. Red corresponds to Lee J. Cobb.
• Figure 2 displays total encouragements, interruptions, and group communications for each juror.
• Figure 3 displays total individual communications from each juror. This includes communication to every juror, interruptions, encouragements, and communication made to the entire group.

This entry was posted by Matthew Crumley on Saturday, July 14th, 2007 at 5:13 PM. Matthew is currently a software developer who works on simulation devices and their user interfaces. In his spare time he reads the news, dabbles with code, is active in his homeowner association, and enjoys life with his wife and pet terrier. You can leave Matthew a comment or trackback from your own site. Follow comments to this entry via RSS. Explore other posts marked with these tags: college, essay, movie.