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Do group dynamics change how cooperation spreads?
Anzhi Sheng, Alex McAvoy, Ye Tian, Silun Zhang, Angela Fontan, Joshua B. Plotkin
May 22, 2026
Most models treat social interactions as pairwise connections, but real groups involve simultaneous multi-person influence—think team sports or committee decisions. This work extends the classical toolkit (pair approximation) to handle groups of any size, showing that cooperation thresholds shift unpredictably when payoffs depend on group membership. The same framework predicts how traits spread through group inheritance—useful for disease modeling and evolutionary dynamics.
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