Vaccination behavior by coupling the epidemic spreading with the human decision under the game theory

Abstract When confronting the epidemics or pandemics, there often exists an interplay between epidemic incidence and the vaccination strategies of individuals. Recently, the characteristics of human behaviors, such as imitating nature or bandwagon effect, have been proven critical to the final herd immunity. In this paper, by establishing a two-layered multiplex network model which combines SIR epidemic process, vaccination decision-making and imitating human nature, we discover that imitating behavior would restrain the increase of herd immunity, which is verified by Monte Carlo simulations and mean-field equations, respectively. Interestingly, a suitable quantity of conformity motivated individual, counter-intuitively, could be beneficial to save the social costs. At the same time, we analytically determine the precise conditions for the minimum total social costs. The current results can help to understand the behavior of social group in depth and then explore public attitudes concerning the vaccine, which usually has a tremendous impact on social vaccine take-up within the population.