Networked risk perception and behavioral bubbles: the case of a pandemic

Abstract

Risk perception is typically modeled as an individual cognitive readout of objective hazard, yet during crises what people judge as risky is shaped by what their peers do. Using weekly mobility data from 313 Massachusetts municipalities over the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic and a pre-pandemic inter-town mobility network that fixes interaction structure before the shock, we estimate two-way fixed-effects panel regressions that separate local case response, inter-town behavioral spillover along the mobility network, and within-town inertia; the pre-shock network and a lagged peer signal address the standard reflection and endogenous-group concerns. Three findings emerge. First, inter-town behavioral spillovers are substantial and localize almost entirely within mobility-defined communities, with effectively no propagation across community boundaries, the empirical referent of behavioral bubbles. Second, the within-community spillover carries behavioral content beyond peer-town case information: when network-exposure-to-cases and network-exposure-to-behavior are raced, the behavioral channel survives and the case-exposure channel goes null. Third, a joint mobility-by-demographic decomposition shows the spillover requires both routine connection and demographic similarity. It concentrates where towns are connected and similar, and vanishes between similar towns that are not connected, ruling out a shared-conditions confound and pointing to an observational and normative channel rather than a purely informational one. These results recast risk perception as a networked phenomenon and identify mobility-defined communities, rather than administrative units, as the operative scale of behavioral response. The pattern should generalize wherever exposure is uncertain, evolving, and socially negotiated, including climate adaptation and financial contagion.