Suchergebnisse

The global pandemic of COVID-19 revealed the dynamic heterogeneity in how individuals respond to infection risks, government orders, and community-specific social norms. Here we demonstrate how both individual observation and social learning are likely to shape behavioral, and therefore epidemiological, dynamics over time. Efforts to delay and reduce infections can compromise their own success, especially when disease risk and social learning interact within sub-populations, as when people observe others who are (a) infected and/or (b) socially distancing to protect themselves from infection. Simulating socially-learning agents who observe effects of a contagious virus, our modelling results are consistent with with 2020 data on mask-wearing in the U.S. and also concur with general observations of cohort induced differences in reactions to public health recommendations. We show how shifting reliance on types of learning affect the course of an outbreak, and could therefore factor into policy-based interventions incorporating age-based cohort differences in response behavior.

Abstract
We discuss a Red Team-Blue Team (RT-BT) study conducted to examine the formation and efficacy of social networks in self-organizing, ad hoc, or crowd-sourced intelligence and counter-intelligence operations in grassroots, improvised communities. Student volunteers were sorted into two teams: one team (Blue) was asked to find puzzle pieces using clues provided by the organizers, with the goal of reconstructing a message contained therein, while the opposing team (Red) was tasked with disrupting this process. While the Blue Team quickly organized into an efficient, centrally-governed structure, the Red Team instead adopted a decentralized, distributed operational network to hinder puzzle completion, using creative and diverse infiltration and disruption methods to interfere in the more centralized, hierarchical organization of their opponents. This exercise shows how untrained, unaffiliated individuals may self-organize into different types of social organizations to accomplish common tasks when aware of potential adversarial organizations, and how these choices may affect their efficacy in accomplishing collaborative clandestine goals.