Social Norms in Cinema: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Shame, Pride and Prejudice (2025)

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.

## introduction shame and pride are social emotions expressed across cultures to motivate and regulate people's thoughts, feelings, behaviors, achievements, and social adaptations @xcite @xcite . the expressions and appraisals of shame and pride vary across cultures and is a research question of great significance to understand society and self-regulation @xcite @xcite . the overarching question we ask in this paper is, how and why shame and pride are expressed across cultures. knowing cross-cultural differences in shame/priderelated expressions will help us measure psychological constructs such as shame proneness @xcite and self-esteem @xcite reliably from language -enabling effective human-computer interactions in domains such as ai-driven psychotherapy (resendiz and klinger, 2023; @xcite . ## movies subtitles corpora movies provide culture-specific life-like depictions of social situations @xcite . the natural conversation style between characters in movies can reveal the social power dynamics (e.g., boss-employee, fatherdaughter) and gender roles. another potential alternative is social media posts however, they are (a) skewed to social situations specific to young demographic groups from western countries, and (b) are second-hand reports that do not reveal fully the social dynamics of how shame/pride are expressed in natural conversations, for instance, between a boss and an employee. we collected english subtitles for 5,435 hollywood and bollywood movies that were released post-1990 by auto-crawling websites that host or link movie subtitles (see ## approach fig. 1 illustrates our study design comprising two key approaches (a) using a psychosocial vocabulary approach to measure how expressions of shame and pride differ and (b) prompting llm approach to extract reasons behind them and how they differ between india and the u.s.a. ## discussion we release a cross-cultural dataset of shame-and pride-related expressions with implicit reasons behind them. to the best of our knowledge, the only related corpus is the goemotions dataset @xcite comprising 817 samples for embarrassment and 452 samples for pride. our dataset can help develop computational models for detecting shame/pride expressions and recognizing how appraisals of such emotions vary -enabling culturally cognisant human-computer conversations for diverse users @xcite and cross-cultural intent translation foot_4 . shame is a highly undesirable emotion emphasizing incompetency and failures in the u.s. and used sparingly @xcite whereas eastern cultures use shame more frequently and it is known to have a desirable affect @xcite . notably, we also observe that shame is 4.5 times more common in bollywood compared to hollywood. we also observe that shame is selffocused (reflecting internal shame) in hollywood (see eliciting reasons leading to shame and pride expressions revealed social expectations across cultures. we observed high specificity in extracted reasons revealing cultural subtleties (e.g., desire for a son in bollywood vs. returning calls after date night in hollywood). to tease apart cultural differences, we first considered mapping social expectations/generated reasons to schwartz's theory of values @xcite . however, social expectations were found to have contrasting values depending on the culture. consider "refusing to marry", an instance of non-conformity in indian society, whereas it is an instance of self-direction in a western context. we thus performed hierarchical clustering and empirically picked the distance after manually analyzing the quality and granularity of clusters. the situations connected to shame and pride in the u.s. society (i.e., lacking accountability, poverty, harm) vs indian society (e.g., inappropriate sexual behavior, gender roles, betrayal -see fig 4 and 5) align with known cultural tendencies (i.e., individualist vs collectivist) of both nations @xcite . the vision of safe and accountable ai is centered on llms' moral and value alignment. the dominant approach for norm discovery involves prompting llms, sometimes coupled with a verification step such as an entailment test or identifying underlying emotion (negative @xmath0. however, a majority of social situations and the human annotators employed to label those situations reflect english beliefs and ethics. our approach for extracting culture-specific social expectations and attitudes using social emotions overcomes this limitation. while the clustering was performed on the reasons extracted from movie conversations, the cluster themes are similar to patterns seen during liwc analysis, validating our approach for overcoming anglocentric bias in llms for norm discovery. lastly, we examined how social expectations associated with shame/pride are attributed to men and women across cultures influencing their social behaviors. for example, women are less assertive across cultures to avoid negative attribution @xcite and ask for less during negotiation than men @xcite . we demonstrated that shame, a negative self-conscious emotion expressing devaluation, is targeted toward women more than men, and pride, a social emotion endorsing social value, is more used for men than women. the similarity in social expectations (e.g. regulating sexual behaviors of women vs shaming incompetency in men) across cultures is surprising. we thus feel that it is important to characterize social biases in the training data before their use for aligning llms. ## conclusion we introduced a multi-cultural dataset of shame/pride-related expressions and the underlying social expectations. this study demonstrates (a) cross-cultural linguistic differences in shame and pride-related expression, offering insights into their functions across cultures, (b) cultural dichotomy in social expectations, and (c) more "social sanctions" and fewer "endorsements" to women in movies. future work can utilize our dataset for culturally aligned llms and build social emotion perception and appraisal in human-computer interactions. additionally, our analysis of shame/pride is the first of its kind; we hope future nlp researchers will build upon this work to investigate social expectations in llms from a multicultural, social emotion-based perspective.