Cross-Cultural Analysis of Human Values, Morals, and Biases in Folk Tales (2023)

Abstract: Folk tales are strong cultural and social influences in children’s lives, and they are known to teach morals and values. However, existing studies on folk tales are largely limited to European tales. In our study, we compile a large corpus of over 1,900 tales originating from 27 diverse cultures across six continents. Using a range of lexicons and correlation analyses, we examine how human values, morals, and gender biases are expressed in folk tales across cultures. We discover differences between cultures in prevalent values and morals, as well as cross-cultural trends in problematic gender biases. Furthermore, we find trends of reduced value expression when examining public-domain fiction stories, extrinsically validate our analyses against the multicultural Schwartz Survey of Cultural Values and the Global Gender Gap Report, and find traditional gender biases associated with values, morals, and agency. This large-scale cross-cultural study of folk tales paves the way towards future studies on how literature influences and reflects cultural norms.

## introduction folk tales are stories told in the oral tradition. all cultures tell stories, though the manner in which the stories are told can differ @xcite . according to folklorist william @xcite , folktales have four purposes: (1) to let people escape from society, (2) to validate and justify culture, (3) to reinforce morals and values, and (4) to apply social pressure. most of the previous work on folk and fairy tales has focused on a limited set of anglo-american or european cultures, ignoring large swaths of the world's diverse cultures. in this paper, we present a cross-cultural analysis of folk tales covering a wide range of cultures around the world, focusing on balcom's latter two purposes. specifically, we examine the values, morals, and gender biases expressed in folk tales, quantifying similarities and differences in how these aspects are expressed across cultures. to do so, we first compile a large corpus of over 1,900 folk tales originating from 27 cultures from multiple online sources. we then employ lexicon-based correlation analyses to investigate human values in folk tales across cultures. to extrinsically validate our analyses, we compare values expressed in folk tales with values expressed in long-form novels, as well as cultural values from the schwartz cultural values orientation survey @xcite . in a similar manner, we analyze morals in folk tales, using the framework of moral foundation theory @xcite . further, we investigate the representation of male and female characters in folk tales, as well as gender associations with values, morals, and verbs of agency and power. our analyses of values, morals, and gender bias in folk tales across cultures reveal statistically significant differences between cultures, as well as cross-cultural trends, which we detail in the following sections. this paper presents several novel contributions: (1) the collection of a large dataset of folk and fairy tales from across 27 cultures, (2) the application of automatic lexicon-based measurements of values and morals to folk tales across cultures, which have traditionally been manual efforts, (3) crosscultural analyses of these folk tales with respect to values and morals, revealing values corresponding to human connection, and (4) cross-cultural analyses of gender biases with respect to values, morals, agency, and power, revealing associations with traditional gender roles. to our knowledge, this is the largest cross-cultural computational study of folk tales, covering cultures from six continents. code and data for reproducing our experiments can be found at github.com/wswu/folktales. we combine tales from these three data sources with the following modifications: (1) we consider tales whose provenance in aft is "aesop" to be from greece; 3 (2) we remove duplicate tales (the culture of origin is identical and the jaccard similarity between the lowercased words in the title is greater than 0.8); (3) we remove tales shorter than 50 or longer than 4,000 tokens (for speed; 13 tales were removed); (4) for adequate representation, we only keep tales when there are at least 10 tales from that culture; (5) to facilitate our analysis, we remove tales not available in english. we emphasize that while the text is in english, the content of the tales is representative of the tales' culture. for tales not originally written in english, some tales were compiled in english based on interactions with native speakers, while others were translated into english from existing sources. to our knowledge, all folk tale compilers and translators were professional folklorists who have dedicated their lives to studying a specific culture, and thus have an intimate understanding of the culture of the tale, as well as native-level proficiency in english and the original language. africa australia austria brazil canada china denmark england france germany greece himalayas hungary iceland india ireland italy japan norway pakistan philippines romania russia scotland serbia spain sweden switzerland turkey usa wales 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 # tales aft mftd gutenberg tales come from mftd, and 257 tales come from project gutenberg, with an average of 1,036 words per tale. figure 1 presents the total number of tales from each culture. ## human values one of the functions of folklore is to teach and reinforce values @xcite . values are inextricably connected with culture, and naturally, people in different cultures hold different values. a long line of research by social psychologist shalom schwartz has proposed the theory of basic human values @xcite , which are universal guiding principles for a person or group. schwartz originally identified 10 human values @xcite , later 19 @xcite , which were validated to be comprehensive across cultures through surveys in over 65 countries. values and morals in fairy tales have also been manually analyzed and annotated, especially in the education literature (e.g. @xcite . however, these studies are usually limited to a small set of tales of interest. in addition, existing work measuring cross-cultural values @xcite often rely on surveys, which are time-consuming and require human labor. to enable the analysis of folk tales at a large scale, we propose an automated lexicon-based method to measure human values. we use the values lexicon, a crowd-sourced lexicon of 49 human values @xcite containing 1,267 english words and phrases. the values lexicon was constructed based on crowdsourcing by users from the united states, india, kenya, the philippines, and trinidad and tobago. it has been validated against human-labeled word intrusion and category matching tasks with high accuracy. the we analyze folk tales for human values using the following process. first, we tokenize and lowercase each tale with spacy. 4 we then compute a distribution of human values for each tale by counting tokens associated with a human value and normalizing by the total number of tokens in the text. we compare and analyze these distributions across cultures to answer several research questions below. what values are expressed in folk tales? to identify the most common values expressed in folk tales, we examine the top three most prevalent values within each tale. across all cultures, the most common values are social values, followed by society and relationships, as shown in figure 2 , computed by examining the top three most prevalent values within each tale. the social value contains words like mother, father, son, together, house, home, family, and live. many words in 4 spacy.io the social value overlap with society and relationships words. these values reveal that across cultures, folk tales emphasize values related to human connection. several other prevalent values, including relationships, helping-others, family, significant-other, and children, are directly related to interpersonal relationships. this is significant because humans are wired to form bonds with one another @xcite . many folk tales, which were originally orally passed down, may have been created to reinforce the importance, or even usefulness, of human connections in past societies. what are the most common values by culture? next, we examine whether there are differences in the values expressed in folk tales from different cultures. figure 2 plots the top 10 values expressed in each culture's tales, where the dark color indicates that the value is more prevalent (the full figure with all values is presented in figure 6 ). a visual inspection reveals that there are differences within cultures, and this is natural because each culture has unique societal norms @xcite . for example, research has shown that there are differences in basic societal values between europe and asia @xcite . indeed, our analysis shows that the cultures of the himalayas, hungary, and the philippines show the strongest expression of social values, compared to denmark, france, and greece, which show the weakest expression. to test whether these differences are statistically significant, we perform multiple two-sided t-tests, with bonferroni correction, because we are making thousands of comparisons. we find a total of 229 statistically significant differences (@xmath0.05) when comparing any two culture-value pairs. for example, hungary's expression of social values is statistically significantly different from italy, norway, denmark, france, and greece. while these africa australia austria brazil canada china denmark england france germany greece himalayas hungary iceland india ireland italy japan norway pakistan philippines romania russia scotland serbia spain sweden switzerland turkey usa wales children cognition family helpingothers parents relationships respect significantother social society results are significant, the interpretation of these results requires in-depth knowledge of the respective cultures. for example, the philippines is said to have "no culture" but had a strong social hierarchy before being colonized by spain @xcite , which may explain the high expression of social words in its tales. we emphasize that these kinds of large cross-cultural analyses of values are possible without the use of surveys, as is the norm in the existing literature on cross-cultural values, but will require collaboration with cultural anthropologists and other social scientists to fully understand the findings from such analyses. ## moral foundations folk tales also teach morals @xcite , and culture is an important variable that shapes one's morals @xcite . to examine morals in folk tales, we employ moral foundations theory (mft; @xcite , which was created by social psychologists to explain the basis of moral actions. mft defines five moral foundations, foot_1 each with a positive and negative aspect: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. mft has recently been used to analyze a variety of text, most notably in social media and politics (e.g. @xcite @xcite . analogous to our analysis of human values, we perform a lexicon-based analysis of moral foundations on folk tales by employing the moral foundations dictionary 2.0 @xcite , which associates 2,103 words and phrases with the 10 moral foundations in mft. figure 3 displays the distribution of cultures expressing moral foundations through folk tales. are there cross-cultural trends in moral foundations expressed in folk tales? we first examine cross-cultural trends. overall, we find a stronger expression of positive dimensions (care, loyalty, authority, and sanctity) compared to the negative dimensions. this may be because positive aspects of morality ("thou shalt") promote human welfare in comparison to negative aspects africa australia austria brazil canada china denmark england france germany greece himalayas hungary iceland india ireland italy japan norway pakistan philippines romania russia scotland serbia spain sweden switzerland turkey usa wales care harm fairness cheating loyalty betrayal authority subversion sanctity degradation ("thou shalt not") @xcite . as tools for teaching, folk tales need to convey their message, and positive interactions are a more effective way to do so. in addition, we find that the fairness/cheating dimension is more weakly expressed compared to the other dimensions. looking across cultures, we identify statistically significant differences in the expressions of morality by performing multiple t-tests with bonferroni correction. our analysis identified 54 statistically significant differences. the full listing of these culture pairs is presented in figure 8 . as a case study, we consider folk tales from china, which shows significant differences from other cultures in its expression of authority. it is well known that chinese culture values deference to authority @xcite . how is this value reflected in folk tales? we examine the most frequent words associated with the authority dimension in chinese and spanish folk tales, shown in finally, we turn our focus to gender bias, which is pervasive in children's literature @xcite . studies have shown that gender stereotypes are picked up by the children reading the tales. for example, in a study of primary-school children who read cinderella, girls did not identify with cinderella due to her lack of independence, but boys identified with prince charming due to his independence @xcite ). an investigation of gender stereotypes in 247 children's books indicated that gender bias is indicative of the target audience @xcite . other studies show that in children's books, mothers play a dominant role in parenting, while fathers are underrepresented @xcite . some of these gender discrepancies disappear if the author is female @xcite . there has been growing interest in investigating gender bias in children's literature, specifically children's books, but there is little work on large collections of folk tales across multiple cultures. our work seeks to rectify this shortcoming in the literature. to support the analyses in this paper, we first identify the gender of characters in each tale. we follow the process in lucy and bamman (2021) of performing dependency parsing on each tale using spacy with the en_core_web_sm model and coreference resolution using fast-coref @xcite . within each coreference cluster, we assign the character's gen- how are genders represented in folk tales? across cultures, stories simply have more male characters than female characters. 7 in total, our dataset contains 1,680 female characters and 3,853 characters (a 2.29x difference). when computing gender proportions on a per-tale basis, we find that a tale has on average 2.57 male characters for every female character. figure 4 shows the stark differences in the ratio of male characters to female characters in folk tales. similar gender disparities have been found in fairy tales @xcite ), children's picture books @xcite , and movies @xcite . what is the relationship between gender and values? while some folk tales were written for educational value, @xcite argues that many 7 many tales have animals as characters, but these animals are anthropomorphized and given a gender. what is the relationship between gender and moral foundations? using the same procedure for analyzing gender and human values, we compute the association between gender and moral foundations ( what is the relationship between gender, agency, and power? characters can be perceived to have agency and power based on the actions they take. as an example from @xcite , consider the verbs "accept" and "assess". a character who accepts things is perceived to be more passive (lower agency) than someone who assesses. @xcite found that male characters are portrayed with more agency than female characters in movie scripts. can we also see these differences in folk tales? following @xcite , we perform dependency parsing on our folk tales using spacy to identify verbs, the sub- next, we examine power. @xcite annotates verbs for power in one of three ways: either the agent has stronger power than the theme, the theme (object) has stronger power than the agent, or the power between the agent and theme are equal. we examine the association between male and female characters as agents and themes of agent-powerful vs. theme-powerful verbs in ## conclusion this paper presented a large-scale cross-cultural analysis of values, morals, and gender bias in folk tales. we first collected a large dataset of over 1,900 folk tales from 27 diverse cultures around the world. building upon well-known theories of basic human values and moral foundations, we analyzed word usage in folk tales to identify crosscultural trends of values involving human connection, as well as culture-specific preferences in the values and morals expressed in folk tales. our analysis of gender bias in folk tales reveals that across cultures, male and female characters in the tales are associated with values and morals that are traditionally thought of as masculine and feminine, respectively. in addition, we found male characters have more agency in events than female characters. this large-scale cross-cultural study of folk tales paves the way forward for future studies on how literature influences and reflects cultural norms. while folk tales are a reflection of their respective cultures, they can also have profound influences hundreds of years down the road on children reading these tales. understanding the true effect of reading folk tales may require unrealistic longitudinal studies. however, machines are making great strides in language understanding. one interesting avenue of future research is to use nlp models to create new folk tales. indeed, there have been some (manual) efforts to purposefully create or rewrite stories that subvert established gender biases @xcite . with recent advances in language modeling, we would like to automatically write stories using controllable generation and style transfer techniques. the automatic production of such debiased literature will hopefully bring awareness to long-standing biases that pervade our society. search (launch) labs at the university of michigan for the insightful discussions during the early stage of the project. this project was partially funded by an award from the templeton foundation (#62256), a grant from the air force office of scientific research (#fa9550-22-1-0099), and a grant from the department of state (#stc10023gr0014). any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the templeton foundation or the air force office of scientific research or the department of state.