Abstract for: Fear as Contagion: the Ebola Crisis and Public Fear Networks A System Dynamics Approach

One of the most important problems during a period of crisis in any country is how to respond to the public’s fear. There has been a lot of research investigating epidemic diseases and the corresponding fear. However, a mere paucity of these have employed a system dynamics (SD) approach to demonstrate the relationships between pandemics and the public response to fear, the public perception of epidemic, related organization’s response to the issue, or even economic loss due to the irrational policies that governors apply to reduce the speed of disease spread. In this study, an SD model has been developed to study the hidden relations of some irrational behaviors and the spread of fear that accompanies the spread of disease. More specifically, our focus is on fear among the population due to the Ebola crisis.