A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Social Norms in Bollywood and Hollywood Movies

Understanding how social norms vary across cultures can help us build culturally aligned NLP systems. We propose a culture agnostic approach to norm discovery, using moral emotions, shame and pride, to identify examples of normative expectations and extract corresponding social norms. We present the first cross cultural self-conscious emotions dataset, obtained from 5.4K Bollywood and Hollywood movies, along with over 10K extracted social norms. We validate our dataset using native speakers and demonstrate how our dataset reveals variations in social norms that align with the cultural dichotomy observed in these nations e.g., Bollywood movies emphasize shame due to deviation from social roles, and express pride in family honor, while Hollywood shames poverty and incompetence, and takes pride in ethical behavior. Notably, females are shamed more across both cultures and both cultures shame women for violating similar normative expectations.