Social Norms in Cinema: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Shame, Pride and Prejudice
Sunny Rai, Khushang Zaveri, Shreya Havaldar, Soumna Nema, Lyle Ungar, Sharath Chandra Guntuku
Abstract
Shame and pride are social emotions expressed across cultures to motivate and regulate people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. In this paper, we introduce the first cross-cultural dataset of over 10k shame/pride-related expressions with underlying social expectations from ~5.4K Bollywood and Hollywood movies. We examine *how* and *why* shame and pride are expressed across cultures using a blend of psychology-informed language analysis combined with large language models. We find significant cross-cultural differences in shame and pride expression aligning with known cultural tendencies of the USA and India – e.g., in Hollywood, shame-expressions predominantly discuss *self* whereas shame is expressed toward *others* in Bollywood. Women are more sanctioned across cultures and for violating similar social expectations.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{rai-etal-2025-social,
title = "Social Norms in Cinema: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Shame, Pride and Prejudice",
author = "Rai, Sunny and
Zaveri, Khushang and
Havaldar, Shreya and
Nema, Soumna and
Ungar, Lyle and
Guntuku, Sharath Chandra",
editor = "Chiruzzo, Luis and
Ritter, Alan and
Wang, Lu",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = apr,
year = "2025",
address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-long.568/",
pages = "11396--11415",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-189-6"
}