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arXiv · 2609.27012

Infectious behaviour: Simulating the effects of communication and social influence on pathogen transmission in crowds

Sophia Johanna Wagner·Anne Templeton·Gerta Köster
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Abstract

Public health measures at mass gatherings work only if people follow them, and adherence depends both on how instructions are communicated and what others do. We link these behavioural factors to pathogen transmission in a local-scale, agent-based exposure model combining pedestrian dynamics with airborne transmission. Rather than fitting a parametric behavioural model, agents draw their adherence at run time from survey respondents (2,170 attendees of UK sports and music events) who reported the same context: we vary stewards' communication effectiveness and adherence of role models, as well as agents' shared social identity with each, assuming that strong shared social identity increases their influence. In a ticket-checkpoint queue of 101 agents, effective communication combined with strong shared social identity with stewards reduces the number of highly exposed agents by 82\% for mask wearing. In contrast, strong shared social identity with non-adhering role models gives almost nine times as many highly exposed agents as with adhering role models. Physical distancing was not monotonically beneficial, because adherence changes how agents move: an infectious agent that kept distance moved along the edge of the queue, leading to similar results across conditions. Our pipeline transfers to any survey that includes behavioural measures and contextual variables.

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Sophia Johanna Wagner, Anne Templeton, Gerta Köster. 2026-09-22. Infectious behaviour: Simulating the effects of communication and social influence on pathogen transmission in crowds. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27012

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