Orcs vs. Trolls: Decisions, Divisions, and Disease
We are living in a world of increasing social divisions that shape the way we interact with one another. Do these social divisions also affect our health? After all, from children eating cake sprinkled with a bit of saliva from an over exuberant birthday boy to fans exchanging jeers and airborne particles at the championship game, our social behaviors are regularly seized on by pathogens as opportunities to infect new hosts. Beyond potential fodder for gossip on local message boards, the way that we interact with our neighbors may determine how infectious diseases spread between us. In our new paper “Social divisions and risk perception drive divergent epidemics and large later waves,” we develop a mathematical model to show how group differences in risk perception and behavior can transform how outbreaks unfold.
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