Speaker
Description
Epidemic dynamics are shaped not only by biological processes but also by how individuals perceive risk, adopt protective behaviours, and interact within socially structured populations. This talk explores how behavioural feedback and social homophily jointly influence the uptake of interventions and disease transmission dynamics. We will introduce a homophily-based modelling framework in which contact patterns and attitude change depend on vaccination beliefs. Individuals preferentially interact with others who share similar attitudes, while hesitant individuals may change their beliefs through social influence. We demonstrate how homophily reshapes epidemic outcomes by redistributing risk across attitudinal groups, creating localized pockets of high susceptibility and infection. Importantly, the results show that high overall vaccination coverage does not guarantee population-level protection when coverage is socially clustered, and that distinct homophily mechanisms or levels can produce similar vaccination coverage yet lead to vastly different epidemic outcomes. These results highlight the limitations of homogeneous mixing assumptions and underscore the need to integrate behavioural dynamics and social structure into network models of epidemics.
