Endogenous Human Behaviors in a Pneumonic Plague Simulation

This report builds on a previous epidemiological model of a pneumonic plague outbreak that incorporated three behavioral responses as exogenous drivers and evaluated their importance in allowing us to replicate the actual outbreak (Heinbokel & Potash, ISDC-2003). The current paper describes our subsequent efforts to incorporate those critical and controlling behavioral dimensions into this model as critical feedback loops. We conceptually deconstructed the event into four segments: becoming aware of the outbreak, deciding to act in response, choosing a specific response, and returning to normal behavior. We utilized current psychological theories, such as the “Psychometric Paradigm ” and “Brunswik’s Lens Model, ” to build small, conceptually clear, transferable, and combinable behavioral submodels to simulate the first three segments involving information and social networks, social trust, and risk perceptions. We believe these modeling efforts comprise first steps in a critical process of translating current, frequently static, risk theories to dynamically responsive vehicles that can be flexibly and quantitatively applied to reliably aid in understanding and influencing responses to such public health threats, other extreme events, and other dynamic risk scenarios in general. Backgroun