Social Norms in Cinema: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Shame, Pride and Prejudice

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.