J. P. Pinasco, N. Saintier, H. Tettamanti, M. Zanella

Preprint arXiv, 2026

We study a kinetic multi-agent framework coupling opinion dynamics with epidemic spreading, where individual social behaviour both affects and is affected by disease transmission. Each agent is characterised by an epidemiological state and a continuous opinion variable measuring compliance with non-pharmaceutical interventions. The key mechanism of the model is an asymmetric opinion update driven by epidemic encounters: infection events induce more cautious attitudes, while failed transmissions push individuals toward more extreme opinions. We focus on a prototypical SIS setting, for which we derive a macroscopic kinetic description and, in a fast social-interaction regime, a reduced system of differential equations capturing the feedback between epidemic prevalence and opinion evolution. Convergence of the reduced model is rigorously quantified through a modified Wasserstein distance. Numerical simulations highlight how infection-induced awareness and non-infection-driven extremization jointly shape collective epidemic-opinion dynamics.