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.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.emnlp-main.311
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Singapore
- Editors:
- Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 5113–5125
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.311
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.311
- Cite (ACL):
- Winston Wu, Lu Wang, and Rada Mihalcea. 2023. Cross-Cultural Analysis of Human Values, Morals, and Biases in Folk Tales. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 5113–5125, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Cross-Cultural Analysis of Human Values, Morals, and Biases in Folk Tales (Wu et al., EMNLP 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp-22-attachments/2023.emnlp-main.311.pdf