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Analysis Of ' Twelve Angry Men '

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“Twelve Angry Men” is an American film in which one person – Juror No8 – was able to convince the other 11 Jurors to vote “not guilty” in a murder trial, although all jurors pre-voted otherwise in the first minutes of counseling. The speeches of Juror No8 can provide a valuable example of different effective negotiation techniques. Thus, the aim of this paper is to analyze negotiation strategies of Juror No8 and to show how they can be used in personal and professional life to reach a certain goal. The first technique applied by Juror No8 is imagining a situation from personal perspective. He started cautiously with referring to his own actions in similar situation and used such phrases as “I kept putting myself in the kids place…”, “If …show more content…

In the movie, Juror No8 made other jurors consider the situation from two perspectives - assuming that the boy on trial is guilty (“Supposing he did kill his father….”) and assuming that the boy is not guilty (“Supposing they [facts] are wrong…?”, “Supposing the boy is not guilty…”) (“12 Angry Men”, 1957). Technique #2 can be effectively used in personal life in cases where you have to convince a member of your family or a friend to choose a vacation destination, a house to buy, or even choose a place to have dinner. To do that, you need to make your partner imagine a situation in which he/she is on vacation, in a house or a restaurant that you want. The strategy of Assumption can be effectively used in advertising in order to make consumers see how their lives will change “assuming” they have a product, for example, assuming how a woman would feel if she had an advertised brand bag or shoes. Advertising campaigns can also use Assumption strategy to compare two products – imagining using brand product vs the commonly used one. Generalization is another technique that helped Juror No8 to convince other jurors. It is a well-known Sherlock Holmes’ deductive method of investigation in which what is known to be true about all people is applied to a particular person. This strategy can also be called a rational–based approach in which the negotiator uses reason to convince the opponent (Lewicki et al., 2014). Juror No8 implemented this technique to

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