Emotional Contagion Modeled Through the Empathy Quotient: an Epidemiological Analogy Towards Social Sustainability

Abstract

The United Nations organization’s Agenda for 2030 is based on five fundamental pillars: people, planet, prosperity, peace, and partnership. Hence, communities around the world will need to rely on factors that can promote Social Sustainability. Our work envisages three essential concepts to leverage social development: Empathy, Emotions, and Social Sustainability. It emerges from the hypothesis that the behavior of the Emotional Contagion phenomenon can be modeled similarly to disease proliferation, considering Empathy as its main factor. We propose a social simulation model for emotional contagion, considering that the probability of one adopting others’ emotions can derive from the empathy level of the individual, which is obtained through the Empathy Quotient score. The population sample of virtual agents is randomly generated following a normal distribution, which can be formed either by individuals without empathy limitations, or by Asperger Syndrome or High-Functioning Autism patients. The results from our experiments showed that the analogy between Emotional Contagion and disease proliferation fits in our empirical predictions suggesting that Empathy can be correlated to metrics such as the disease spread contact rate. It contributes to further studies as a foundation for exploring crowd control mechanisms on conflict scenarios and evaluating human interactions, which are critical factors to yield Social Sustainability in communities.