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

Social emotions such as shame and pride reflect social sanctions or approvals in society. In this paper, we examine how expressions of shame and pride vary across cultures and harness them to extract unspoken normative expectations across cultures. We introduce the first cross-cultural shame/pride emotions movie dialogue dataset, obtained from ~5.4K Bollywood and Hollywood movies, along with over 10K implicit social norms. Our study reveals variations in expressions of social emotions and social norms that align with known cultural tendencies observed in the United States and India -- e.g., Hollywood movies express shame predominantly toward self whereas Bollywood movies express shame predominantly toward others. Similarly, Bollywood shames non-conformity in gender roles, and takes pride in collective identity, while Hollywood shames lack of accountability, and takes pride in ethical behavior. More importantly, women face more prejudice across cultures and are sanctioned for similar social norms.