# Scared into Action: How Partisanship and Fear are Associated with Reactions to Public Health Directives

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.05365 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05365/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 111 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jan 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06520/) (2016)
- [An overview of gradient descent optimization algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04747/) (2016)
- [Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.07187/) (2016)
- [On Measuring and Mitigating Biased Inferences of Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09369/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Differences in political ideology are increasingly appearing as an impediment to successful bipartisan communication from local leadership. For example, recent empirical findings have shown that conservatives are less likely to adhere to COVID-19 health directives. This behavior is in direct contradiction to past research which indicates that conservatives are more rule abiding, prefer to avoid loss, and are more prevention-motivated than liberals. We reconcile this disconnect between recent empirical findings and past research by using insights gathered from press releases, millions of tweets, and mobility data capturing local movement in retail, grocery, workplace, parks, and transit domains during COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders. We find that conservatives adhere to health directives when they express more fear of the virus. In order to better understand this phenomenon, we analyze both official and citizen communications and find that press releases from local and federal government, along with the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases, lead to an increase in expressions of fear on Twitter.