Explosive cooperation in social dilemmas on higher-order networks

Understanding how cooperative behaviours can emerge from competitive interactions is an open problem in biology and social sciences. While interactions are usually modelled as pairwise networks, the units of many real-world systems can also interact in groups of three or more. Here, we introduce a general framework to extend pairwise games to higher-order networks. By studying social dilemmas on hypergraphs with a tunable structure, we find an explosive transition to cooperation triggered by a critical number of higher-order games. The associated bistable regime implies that an initial critical mass of cooperators is also required for the emergence of prosocial behavior. Our results show that higher-order interactions provide a novel explanation for the survival of cooperation.