Risk perception and human behaviors in epidemics

ABSTRACT

Individuals experiencing an epidemic may change their behaviors to prevent themselves from infection by balancing the benefits and costs based on the information about the infectious disease. This study incorporated two types of information—local information, which impacts local human contacts, and global information, which impacts people's travel behaviors—into a spatial evolutionary game to determine individuals' decisions. This article constructs a new behavior-switching-based susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) model using a spatial evolutionary game to study the impact of human behaviors and information dissemination on the spread of infectious disease. This model was evaluated and analyzed using numerical simulations for the population in the state of Kansas. In particular, individuals' perceptions of the risk based on the local information are discussed, which could help us better understand human behaviors and improve communication between policymakers and the public.

KEYWORDS:

• Disease transmission
• human behaviors
• risk perception
• spatial evolutionary game

Acknowledgment

The author is grateful to the anonymous referee for a careful checking of the details and for helpful comments that improved this article.