When’s the last time I changed my mind (and what can I learn from it)?
The 1957 film 12 Angry Men is widely considered one of the greatest ever made (#6 on IMDB, #3 on Letterboxd). It’s perhaps the quintessential example of a chamber film, meaning the whole narrative plays out in one room. That constraint puts the focus on the men, their inner worlds, and the dynamics between them as the stakes intensify. In this particular story, the life of a man on trial for murder is at stake. And while most of the men come into the room with a judgment that seems obvious to them, Juror #8 (Henry Fonda) isn’t quite sure.
[Spoiler Alert] By the end of the film, Juror #8 has convinced 11 obstinate men to see his perspective. But the narrative doesn’t play out like a legal thriller in which Fonda’s character displays exceptional logic to solve the case. Certainly his intelligence and intellectual honesty factor in. But what’s more important in the context is the way the biases, fears, hurts, and desires of the individual men drove their original positions and kept them inflexible. What makes the film so profound is the way these subconscious elements are exposed and the men end up changing their minds. In other words, they held their original positions and defended them not because they were logically sound but because they wanted to.
There’s a phrase that has long stuck with me regarding the way human’s take and hold positions on various subjects. It’s random, but it come’s from one writer’s summary of how Thomas Cranmer (author of The Book of Common Prayer) viewed human behavior. He says, “What the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies.” Note the order. You might have heard a similar sentiment framed by modern writers like Johnathan Haidt as, “the emotional tail wags the rational dog.”
We like to think of ourselves as rational deciders. “Facts don’t care about your feelings”, “take emotion out of it”, etc. etc. But in reality, there’s a whole cocktail of emotional impulses under the surface that drive our initial posture to an idea, the person or group that represents it, whether we’re open to entertaining it, and so on. And even when we adopt a seemingly rational position from which we debate our “correctness”, it’s often our reason being deployed to defend the position we took for emotional reasons.
Again, we like to prize rationality. So is it inherently wrong to be so led by emotions? Not necessarily. What’s important is our ability to gain awareness of the emotional forces driving us and audit them by referencing them against our values. Sound judgement looks like making the unconscious conscious, gaining awareness of the complex forces that drive us, then making a purposeful choice.
So let’s talk about how we change our minds (or refuse to).
Discussion Questions
When is the last time you changed your position on something significant?
In hindsight, did you intellectually know before you emotionally associated with the new position?
What, if anything, prevented you from being free to change your position?
What freed you to change your position?
What did you lose, and what did you gain, from changing your position?
What do you learn from watching others entrench, debate, choose sides, etc.?