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

2024-02-17

AI Summary

This study investigates cross-cultural differences in the cinematic expression of shame and pride—two socially embedded emotions—and the underlying sociocultural normative mechanisms. Method: Leveraging the first large-scale cross-cultural film dataset (5,400 Hollywood and Bollywood films, with >10,000 annotated shame/pride expressions), we integrate a psychology-informed linguistic analysis framework with large language models to systematically examine emotion expression patterns. Contribution/Results: We empirically validate Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory in audiovisual narrative contexts, quantifying significant cross-national differences between the U.S. and India in emotional attribution logic (self- vs. other-oriented), responsibility allocation structures (individual vs. relational accountability), and gendered norm enforcement intensity. Findings reveal Hollywood’s preference for self-directed attributions versus Bollywood’s emphasis on interpersonal obligations; women face heightened affective sanctions for norm violations across both cultures. The study establishes a scalable computational social science paradigm for cross-cultural media analysis.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Natural Language Processing: Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining
• Humans and AI: Learning Human Values and Preferences

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Fairness and bias in social network and social media analysis
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Mining multimedia, multimodal, multilingual, cross-lingual Web data
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance

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.

Problem

• Cross-cultural analysis of shame and pride expressions
• Dataset from Bollywood and Hollywood movies
• Gender differences in social sanctioning

Innovation

• Cross-cultural dataset analysis
• Psychology-informed language analysis
• Large language models utilization