CRITICAL THINKING AND CREATIVE THINKING

The play and subsequent movie “Twelve Angry Men” is an examination of the dynamics that plays in a jury room in the 50’s in the United States. The action revolves around the opinions, perceptions, reason and logic of twelve diverse characters that are tasked with pronouncing the guilt or innocence of a young man accused of patricide. The extraordinary element is that their finding will determine his life or death. This work will explore some elements of critical thinking and creative thinking found within the context of this remarkable movie.
Critical thinking involves the use of a group of interconnected skills to analyze, creatively integrate, and evaluate what you read and hear. To become a critical thinker you must be able to decide whether an author’s opinions are true or false, whether he or she has adequately defended those ideas, whether certain recommendations are practical, as well as whether particular solutions will be effective. The characteristics of that kind of thinking are: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation.
Within that movie, there were three points raised in the trial that juror #8 believed argument analysis: 1- The knife that was the murder weapon was unique and the boy was seen with it, although he said he had lost it. 2- The old man gave evidence that he heard the boy say “I’ll kill you” from his apartment below and he saw the boy running from the down stairs of the apartment after rising from bedroom. 3- That the old lady saw the boy kill his father through her window, while a train was passing.
In that trial most of the jurors are content to use deductive reasoning. Juror #3 gives his reasons for reaching the conclusion that “it is quite clear that the boy never went to the movie that night, returned home and killed his father with the knife as