Structural Divides Shape the Nonlinear Nature of Human Mobility in COVID-19

Mobility reflects collective human behaviour, revealing how people interact with their physical and social environments. The COVID-19 pandemic provided a unique opportunity to identify the hidden behavioural and structural properties of society through its mobility responses, with its unprecedented impulse. Data-driven modelling was applied to a nationwide survey dataset collected from Sri Lanka in 2021, to identify 4 distinct archetypes, namely, Privileged Adaptors, Cautious Traditionalists, Stable Minimalists, and Resilient Rebounders, showing diverse adaptations across 13 key factors. These inductively derived clusters from their crisis-driven mobility adaptations subsequently revealed distinct ethnic, educational, and socioeconomic patterns, showing that human behaviour and socioeconomic status are linked not linearly but through structurally conditioned, nonlinear trajectories of risk absorption. These trajectories are governed by the interplay of substitution capacity, exposure necessity, and support infrastructures of the archetypes, offering a generalizable framework for understanding human behavioural inequality in a global disruption.