Sociocultural Norm Similarities and Differences via Situational Alignment and Explainable Textual Entailment

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method for discovering and comparing social norms across Chinese and American cultures using cross-cultural data, explainable textual entailment, and a new dataset, revealing cultural nuances and model limitations.

Contribution

It presents a new approach to identify and compare social norms across cultures, leveraging in-context learning and a high-quality dataset for cross-cultural norm analysis.

Findings

Models under 3B parameters struggle with explainable social norm entailment.

Cross-cultural norms align with social orientations framework.

Empirical differences in norms reflect cultural nuances.

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.