The impact of threshold decision mechanisms of collective behavior on disease spread
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Humans are a hyper-social species, which greatly impacts the spread of infectious diseases. How do social dynamics impact epidemiology and what are the implications for public health policy? Here, we develop a model of disease transmission that incorporates social dynamics and a behavior that reduces the spread of disease, a voluntary nonpharmaceutical intervention (NPI). We use a "tipping-point" dynamic, previously used in the sociological literature, where individuals adopt a behavior given a sufficient prevalence of the behavior in the population. The thresholds at which individuals adopt the NPI behavior are modulated by the perceived risk of infection, i.e., the disease prevalence and transmission rate, costs to adopt the NPI behavior, and the behavior of others. Social conformity creates a type of "stickiness" whereby individuals are resistant to changing their behavior due to the population's inertia. In this model, we observe a nonmonotonicity in the attack rate as a function of various biological and social parameters such as the transmission rate, efficacy of the NPI, costs of the NPI, weight of social consequences of shirking the social norm, and the degree of heterogeneity in the population. We also observe that the attack rate can be highly sensitive to these parameters due to abrupt shifts in the collective behavior of the population. These results highlight the complex interplay between the dynamics of epidemics and norm-driven collective behaviors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".