Sociocultural Norm Similarities and Differences via Situational Alignment and Explainable Textual Entailment (2023)

Abstract: Designing systems that can reason across cultures requires that they are grounded in the norms of the contexts in which they operate. However, current research on developing computational models of social norms has primarily focused on American society. Here, we propose a novel approach to discover and compare descriptive social norms across Chinese and American cultures. We demonstrate our approach by leveraging discussions on a Chinese Q&A platform—Zhihu—and the existing SocialChemistry dataset as proxies for contrasting cultural axes, align social situations cross-culturally, and extract social norms from texts using in-context learning. Embedding Chain-of-Thought prompting in a human-AI collaborative framework, we build a high-quality dataset of 3,069 social norms aligned with social situations across Chinese and American cultures alongside corresponding free-text explanations. To test the ability of models to reason about social norms across cultures, we introduce the task of explainable social norm entailment, showing that existing models under 3B parameters have significant room for improvement in both automatic and human evaluation. Further analysis of cross-cultural norm differences based on our dataset shows empirical alignment with the social orientations framework, revealing several situational and descriptive nuances in norms across these cultures.

## introduction social norms are normative beliefs that guide behavior in groups and societies @xcite . deviance from these expectations of behavior can cause perceptions of impoliteness @xcite , feelings of offense @xcite , and pragmatic failure @xcite . social norms vary across cultures @xcite , and different cultural norms can lead to conflict within intercultural interactions due to perceptions of deviance @xcite . creating computational systems that can robustly reason and translate across cultures in pragmatic communication requires that they be grounded in these norms and their differences across contexts. as an initial step in addressing this question, we propose a novel approach to discover and compare social norms conditioned on social situations across chinese and american cultures. leveraging 知乎 @xcite , a chinese q&a platform, alongside the existing socialchemistry @xcite dataset on social norms as respective proxies of chinese and american cultural axes, our paper offers the following contributions: our work is situated in the broader literature on the study of social norms @xcite and how they vary across cultures @xcite . here, our work is rooted specifically in the study of descriptive norms @xcite @xcite )-what people actually do, rather than prescriptive norms, or what they think people ought to do-and focuses on the differences between chinese and american cultures. we build on recent computational work in creating systems capable of situated reasoning in social situations, most closely adapting the rule-ofthumb formalism for descriptive norms introduced in @xcite . this line of work not only spans that of commonsense reasoning @xcite , but also in judg-ments of appropriate and ethical behavior @xcite and in grounding behavior in areas like dialogue @xcite and situated question answering @xcite more specifically on underlying knowledge of social norms. in recognizing that social norms are often culturally @xcite and even demographically @xcite specific, prior work in this area has primarily revolved around the normative judgments of majority english-speaking cultures represented within north america. in contrast, here, aligning with the broader goal of creating systems that can effectively reason across cultures and languages @xcite , we focus on computationally studying norms across chinese and american cultures, expanding on the utility of large language models in ways that have the potential to transform modern computational social science @xcite . contemporary studies of chinese cultural societies @xcite emphasize several broad differences relative to american culture. under the framework of social orientations, emphasis in chinese society is placed especially on family, relationship, authority, and personal reputation social orientations. in particular, past work has shown a large significance compared to american culture in familistic collectivism and harmony @xcite @xcite , relational determinism @xcite , and authority worship @xcite @xcite , among other factors, in influencing social behavior. critical reviews of past cross-cultural work have criticized weaknesses in study design and their overly broad generalizations @xcite , in favor of a more fine-grained analysis. here, under the framework of descriptive norms and sourcing data from social media at scale, we conduct a more nuanced analysis of how norms vary across cultures under situational controls. ## data sources our analysis of social norm variation across chinese and american contexts draws from the largest q&a discussion platform in china-知乎 @xcite -and existing data gathered by social-chemistry @xcite , treating these data sources as different cultural axes. social chemistry 101 @xcite ) is a natural language corpus of ethical judgments question: 当有人说家里有丧事时应如何回应更礼 貌? (how to respond politely when someone says there is a funeral in the family?) answer: you can politely pat on their shoulders or tell them to pay attention to their health even though it will be hard for them recently.) rot 1: it is appropriate to say "节哀" to someone who has lost a family member or friend rot 2: it is appropriate to pat someone on the back to show your sympathy to them rot 3: it is appropriate to tell them to take care of themselves though they are sad and social norms on everyday situations. crowdsourced social norms on situations scraped from reddit (i.e., r/amitheasshole) and other sources are expressed in free-text rule-of-thumb form, where each rule-of-thumb consists of a judgment on an action, i.e., "it's rude to run the blender at 5 am". annotators of this dataset are 55% women, and 94% of annotators had spent 10 or more years in the united states; as such, we treat the normative judgments represented within this dataset as originating from a predominantly english-speaking, american context 1 . questions on zhihu are often posed as to in-1 despite the many demographic similarities between our two cultural axes, a few notable differences remain. most notably of which is class composition, where only 47% of annotators of social chemistry 101 considered themselves to be middle-class compared to over 80% of users on zhihu. see our limitations section for a discussion on potential impacts. entailment relation situation: i think i'm jealous of my best friend. us norm: you should be proud of people and not jealous of them. chinese norm: it is not appropriate to be jealous of your best friend. textual explanation: both norms express disapproval of being jealous of someone, especially a best friend. contradiction relation situation: telling my teacher a classmate cheated on a test. us norm: it's wrong to be a tattle-tale. chinese norm: it is not wrong to report a cheating student to the @xmath0: the us norm expresses disapproval of telling on a classmate, while the chinese norm expresses neutrality towards the action. ## human-ai collaboration to create a cross-cultural social norm dataset we enable our computational analysis of social norm variation across chinese and american cultures through a framework of (1) automatic situation alignment, (2) social norm extraction, (3) cross-cultural similarity/difference identification as textual entailment with explanations, and (4) human feedback. an illustration of our human-ai collaboration framework is presented in figure 2. aligning situations across cultures. descriptive judgments of appropriate behavior are often situationally-dependent @xcite ; an accurate comparison of norms across cultures must first ensure a similarity of contexts. for instance, @xcite showed that japanese preferences for conformity disappeared in private compared to when they were being observed. to obtain the closest matching situations between us and chinese contexts, we align situations found in the socialchemistry dataset with similar questions on zhihu. while the zhihu search api allows for direct query searches of platform content, semantic alignment of returned results with queries remains low due to an observed bias in prioritizing entity matches. to improve this alignment of situations between us and chinese contexts, we use xlm-r @xcite to obtain cross-lingual representations of situations and further perform one-to-one matching through cosine similarity. setting the similarity threshold to 0.895 allowed us to align 3069 situations, of which around 80% were correctly aligned, based on a manual review of a random sample of 100 situations. here, incorrectly aligned instances remain valuable for our data as negative samples in our later entailment task as they can be assigned a no relation label. ## experiments and evaluation task. to test the ability of models to reason about social norms across cultures, we introduce the task of explainable social norm entailment. our task is closely related to the explainable natural language inference task, e-snli @xcite , where, in addition to the relation label, a model has to output a natural language explanation for its prediction as well. for every pair of us and chinese norms of a cross-culturally aligned situation, we ask a model to predict the relationship between them (entailment, contradiction, or no relation) and output an explanation for the relation. we test social norms are the informal rules that govern behavior in groups and societies. in this task, you will compare us and chinese social norms. you will be presented with a situation, a us social norm applicable to it, and a list of chinese social norms. your task has 3 steps: 1. select chinese social norm most relevant to the situation. 2. determine the relationship between the chinese norm and the us norm: entailment, contradiction, or no relation. entailment means both norms express similar attitudes towards certain actions/belief given situations. contradiction means two norms express opposite attitudes towards certain actions/belief given situations. select no relation if none of the chinese norms are applicable to the situation. ## cross-cultural norm variation recalling that descriptive norms are situationally dependent, here, using our dataset, we test for factors driving these cross-cultural differences in social norms, testing specifically for (1) situational effects (i.e., when do norms differ?) and (2) descriptive effects (i.e., what do norms differ about?) across chinese and american cultures. ## conclusion and future work in this work, we sought to computationally model social norms across chinese and american cultures, via a human-ai collaboration framework to extract and interpretably compare social norm differences in aligned situations across contexts. our analyses here reveal several nuances in how social norms vary across these cultural contexts, incorporating principles of descriptive ethics that prior studies have often lacked thus far. we see our present work situated in the broader context of designing systems that are able to reason across languages and cultures in an increasingly interconnected global world. here, we highlight a few directions we find exciting for future work; models, code, and anonymized data are made available for further research. 3 deviance from social norms can lead to miscommunication and pragmatic failure @xcite . integrating cross-cultural norm knowledge into socially situated communication systems @xcite could lead to fewer miscommunications in everyday situations, bridge cultures, and increase the accessibility of knowledge and of interpersonal technologies to a far greater extent than traditional translation technologies. while our work has focused on measuring differences in social norms across cultures, culture, though important, is only one of many variableslike age and gender, among others-that affect descriptive ethical judgments @xcite . neither are norms fixed in time @xcite ; future work could, with the aid of social platforms like zhihu and reddit, quantitatively examine not only the evolution of social norms across cultures and platforms but also compare changes between cultures, further bridging theory and empirical study.