In the story "A Jury of Her Peers" the men attempted to gain information and clues from the case from the outside-in. This means that they will primarily look at everything that they can see in the surroundings, take testimony, and make deductions from it.
This is "deductive" thinking, which is logical thinking that starts with general information and leads to a specific conclusion.
The problem is partly that the men are too distracted with the coldness, and even with their animated conversation, to pay closer attention to what they were seeing. What is worse, they are already biased:
a) They already dislike the accused, even though she has not been found guilty. After all, she presumably killed her husband in his sleep!
b) They are somewhat disappointed that this case is about a housewife in the middle of nowhere. They do not openly voice this particular opinion, but they certainly show it in the way that they treat as "trifles" the clues that the women on the scene, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, find along the way.
The young attorney set his lips. "I guess before we're through with her she may have something more serious than preserves to worry about."
"Oh, well," said Mrs. Hale's husband, with good-natured superiority, "women are used to worrying over trifles."
c) The men are also too distracted with the cold weather, and they are more preoccupied with getting to the stove to get warm rather than continue to probe the crime scene.
The men talked for a minute about what a good thing it was the sheriff had sent his deputy out that morning to make a fire for them, and then Sheriff Peters stepped back from the stove, unbuttoned his outer coat, [...]in a way that seemed to mark the beginning of official business.
In contrast, the women were thinking inductively, which is logical thinking that moves in the opposite direction, starting with specific information that leads to a general conclusion.
They did see enough evidence around them, but they did not treat it in isolation. What they did was connect the things that they saw with the things that Mrs. Hale knew. They made inferences, and they analyzed things at a deeper, more personal level: moving from specific observations to a general conclusion.
The women effectively connected the actions of Minnie Wright to their own life experiences. For example, Mrs. Peters was able to make a connection about a time when she once felt so angry at the boy who killed her pet right in front of her, that she jumped at him with all the intention of killing the boy, only she was pushed back.
She also could sympathize with the total silence that seemed to prevail in the Wright residence. It was the same silence that she felt when her 2 year-old son died, and she had nobody else at her home to grieve with her.
Mrs. Hale made the connections based on what she knew of Mrs. Wright prior to this event. She had known the woman before she was married. She new that Minnie was a happy, artistic woman; that her husband John was cold and strange. Moreover, she could see how the death of Minnie's only company, her canary, at the hands of John, could have led her to snap.
Therefore, the men approach the case in a biased way, expecting the evidence to unfold itself. In fact, they leave the scene without any hard evidence to directly link Minnie to the crime. On the contrary, the women go in instinctively knowing that there is something deeper that should explain the situation. Their efforts pay off, and they are able to remove the one piece of evidence that could have pointed to Minnie's snapping.
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