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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.11333 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11333/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 Feb 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Survey of Cultural Awareness in Language Models: Text and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00860/) (2024)
- [Hire Your Anthropologist! Rethinking Culture Benchmarks Through an Anthropological Lens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05931/) (2025)
- [From Anger to Joy: How Nationality Personas Shape Emotion Attribution in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02431/) (2025)
- [Expressing Social Emotions: Misalignment Between LLMs and Human Cultural Emotion Norms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16757/) (2026)
- [Towards Cross-lingual Values Judgment: A Consensus-Pluralism Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17283/) (2026)
- [Beyond Right and Wrong: Evaluating Second-order Social Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05437/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.