162945 20251017144637.0 doi 10.1063/5.0292972 sideral 145383 ART-2025-145383 eng Bretón-Fuertes, Elisa Explosive adoption of corrupt behaviors in social systems with higher-order interactions 2025 Access copy available to the general public Unrestricted Human behaviors in social systems are often shaped by group pressure and collective norms, especially since the rise of social media platforms. However, in the context of adopting misbehaviors, most existing contagion models rely on pairwise interactions and thus fail to capture group-level dynamics. To fill this gap, we introduce a higher-order extension of the honesty–corruption–ostracism model to study the emergence of systemic corruption in populations where individuals interact through group structures. The model incorporates contagion-like transitions mediated by hyperedges of arbitrary order, capturing the influence of peer pressure in group settings. Analytical and numerical results show that higher-order interactions induce discontinuous (explosive) transitions between fully honest and fully corrupt regimes, separated by a bistable phase. This abrupt behavior disappears in the pairwise limit, highlighting the destabilizing effect of group interactions. Furthermore, we establish a general correspondence between our model and broader classes of social contagion dynamics with symmetry breaking, recovering previous results as limiting cases. These findings underscore the critical role of a higher-order structure in shaping behavioral adoption processes and the stability of social systems. info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/DGA/E36-23R-FENOL info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/MICINN/PID2023-147734NB-I00 info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess All rights reserved http://www.europeana.eu/rights/rr-f/ info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion Clemente-Marcuello, Clara Sanz-Arqué, Verónica Tomás-Delgado, Gabriela Lamata-Otín, Santiago Universidad de Zaragoza Pérez-Martínez, Hugo Universidad de Zaragoza (orcid)0000-0001-5959-6724 Gómez-Gardeñes, Jesús Universidad de Zaragoza (orcid)0000-0001-5204-1937 2003 395 Universidad de Zaragoza Dpto. Física Materia Condensa. Área Física Materia Condensada 35, 9 (2025), [10 pp.] Chaos CHAOS 1054-1500 3220556 http://zaguan.unizar.es/record/162945/files/texto_completo.pdf Postprint 3187334 http://zaguan.unizar.es/record/162945/files/texto_completo.jpg?subformat=icon icon Postprint oai:zaguan.unizar.es:162945 articulos driver 2025-10-17-14:30:03 ARTICLE