Flocking-enhanced social contagion

Populations of mobile agents-animal groups, robot swarms, or crowds of people-self-organize into a large diversity of states as a result of information exchanges with their surroundings. While in many situations of interest the motion of the agents is driven by the transmission of information from neighboring peers, previous modeling efforts have overlooked the feedback between motion and information spreading. Here we show that such a feedback results in contagion enhanced by flocking. We introduce a reference model in which agents carry an internal state whose dynamics is governed by the susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) epidemic process, characterizing the spread of information in the population and affecting the way they move in space. This feedback triggers flocking, which is able to foster social contagion by reducing the epidemic threshold with respect to the limit in which agents interact globally. The velocity of the agents controls both the epidemic threshold and the emergence of complex spatial structures, or swarms. By bridging together soft active matter physics and modeling of social dynamics, we shed light upon a positive feedback mechanism driving the self-organization of mobile agents in complex systems.