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arXiv · 2609.31536

Collective impact of opinion formation on agent-based epidemic dynamics

Andrea Bondesan·Riccardo Vecchio·Chiara Barbati·Jonathan Franceschi·Anna Odone·Mattia Zanella
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Abstract

Epidemic spread and collective opinion formation are tightly coupled processes: individual beliefs about the severity of an outbreak and the value of protective measures shape behavior, while the evolving epidemic itself reshapes public sentiment through risk perception. We propose an agent-based framework that couples opinion dynamics with a compartmental epidemic model, in which each agent carries both a health status and a continuous opinion variable describing adherence to protective measures. Opinion evolution is driven by binary interactions among agents and by an exogenous background field that reflects the current state of the epidemic, while the disease transmission rate depends explicitly on the opinions of interacting agents. Using methods of statistical mechanics, we characterize the resulting macroscopic system for the compartmental mass fractions and mean opinions in both far-from-equilibrium and close-to-equilibrium regimes. The calibration shows that incorporating behavioral opinion dynamics substantially improves the interpretation of epidemic evolution. In particular, the inferred risk perception function evolves consistently with the observed epidemic burden, indicating that behavioral adaptation can explain part of the temporal variation that would otherwise be absorbed into time-dependent transmission parameters. Our results illustrate how integrating opinion heterogeneity in kinetic epidemic models offers quantitative insights into the feedback between behavior and disease spread.

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Andrea Bondesan, Riccardo Vecchio, Chiara Barbati, Jonathan Franceschi, Anna Odone, Mattia Zanella. 2026-09-25. Collective impact of opinion formation on agent-based epidemic dynamics. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31536

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