Terrorists use violence in pursuit of political goals. While terror often has severe consequences for victims, it remains an open question how terror attacks affect the general population. We study the behavioral response of citizens of cities affected by 7 different terror attacks. We compare real-time mobile communication patterns in the first 24 hours following a terror attack to the corresponding patterns on days with no terror attack. On ordinary days, the group of female and male participants have different activity patterns. Following a terror attack, however, we observe a significant increase of the gender differences. Knowledge about citizens' behavior response patterns following terror attacks may have important implications for the public response during and after an attack.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2004.02957,
title = {Gender-specific behavior change following terror attacks},
author = {Jonas S. Juul and Laura Alessandretti and Jesper Dammeyer and Ingo Zettler and Sune Lehmann and Joachim Mathiesen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.02957},
year = {2020}
}