Belief in neighbor behavior and confidence in scientific information as barriers to cooperative disease control

Abstract Recent public health events have brought to the forefront the challenges of incorporating collective action behaviors and information seeking and processing behaviors to motivate personal protections to an environmental risk. The economic and social costs of large‐scale spread of disease when there is no cure for the disease, only preventative measures implemented in coordination and cooperation with others, will be effective at addressing the problem. To better understand these challenges in an agricultural context, we create an agent‐based model (ABM) coupling ecological, epidemiological, and economic factors to simulate Huanglongbing (HLB) spread in California. The ABM is used to evaluate how participation in collective action through coordinated area‐wide insecticide spraying is influenced by perception of other growers' participation and confidence in scientific information about the disease. We find a grower's participation in coordinated spraying has little influence on when the infection reaches them but depends primarily on the other growers' action. We discover that over time more growers cooperate in area‐wide coordinated spraying, but after the disease has sufficiently spread, some growers stop cooperating. Moreover, as beliefs in other growers' participation becomes stronger, some growers cooperate less, leading to greater HLB spread. We observe that increased confidence in scientific information lowers HLB spread, as more growers are motivated to cooperate through increased expected cumulative profits. As such, a successful strategy to combat an incurable infectious disease, like HLB, and collective action problems, in general, requires careful consideration of growers' perceptions of their neighbors' behavior and trust in scientific information.