Event

Understanding and managing a pandemic is highly complex, since there is a complicated interplay between the dynamics of the pandemic and the behavior of individuals. On the one hand, individuals can wear masks, get vaccinated, limit their mobility, and socially distance; reducing the chances that they catch the virus and effectively reducing the spreading of the virus. On the other hand, individuals adjust these forms of behavior also to the dynamics of the pandemic: When they perceive increased risk of infection, individuals protect themselves, and they fail to protect when they perceive risks to be low. However, during the Covid pandemic, many western countries experience huge disagreement about the risks and appropriate behavioral responses. A worringly high number of individuals is influenced by fake news and conspiracy theories and, as a consequence, fail to protect themselves. Understanding how such opinion and behavior dynamics affect the pandemic and vice versa is an open research question and will be the focus of this interdisciplinary seminar.

This seminar is coorganized by researchers from TU Berlin, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Lübeck University, and the MPI-DS & University Göttingen, and brings together expertise from physics, sociology, mobility research, and computer science. Participants are introduced to models of diseases spreading, mobility, and opinion dynamics. Next, it is discussed how the interplay of disease spreading and individuals´ behavior can be studied, what dynamics arise from it, and how insights about the pandemic should be communicated by decision makers and the media to the public. In the interactive part of the seminar, participants choose a topic of the course and work in small groups on a joint research project. Seminar participants will have diverse backgrounds (social science, engineering, computer science, physics, science communication), which will be considered in the evaluation of their project report, presentation or term paper. It will be highly appreciated if diverse project teams are formed where students contribute the perspective from their specific background.

Course coordinators:

Dr. Viola Priesemann, Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPI-DS) & University Göttingen

Dr. phil. André Calero Valdez, Lübeck University

Prof. Dr. Michael Mäs, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

Prof. Dr. Kai Nagel, Technische Universität Berlin