Regensburg 2025 – scientific programme
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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme
SOE 8: Networks, From Topology to Dynamics (joint session SOE/BP/DY)
SOE 8.5: Talk
Wednesday, March 19, 2025, 16:15–16:30, H45
Behavioral Heterogeneity in Disease Spread: Contrasting Effects of Prevention Strategies and Social Mixing — •Fabio Sartori1, 2 and Michael Maes1 — 1Chair of Sociology and Computational Social Science, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe — 2Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self Organisation, Göttingen, Germany
Despite mounting evidence of behavioral heterogeneity in response to disease threats, the majority of epidemiological models assume uniform behavior across populations for mathematical tractability. We analyze three distinct mechanisms of behavioral response to disease threat: susceptibility reduction (e.g., mask-wearing), active testing, and vaccination propensity. Through extensive numerical analysis, we demonstrate that the impact of behavioral heterogeneity strongly depends on the specific mechanism involved. While heterogeneous susceptibility-reducing behaviors generally decrease disease spread, heterogeneity in testing rates and vaccination propensity typically amplifies epidemic severity. Furthermore, we show that non-homogeneous mixing patterns, particularly when correlated with behavioral traits, exacerbate disease spread across all three mechanisms. These findings reveal fundamental principles about the interplay between behavioral heterogeneity and epidemic dynamics, challenging the conventional homogeneous assumption and providing important implications for public health interventions and policy design.
Keywords: Epidemiology; Polarization; Contact Matrix; Heterogeneities; SIR+