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In real-world scenarios, cooperation prevails in multi-group (higher-order) populations, beyond just dyadic behaviors. Despite recent studies on group dilemmas in higher-order networks, the exploration of cooperation driven by higher-order strategy updates remains limited due to the intricacy and indivisibility of group-wise interactions. Here we investigate four categories of higher-order mechanisms for strategy updates in public goods games and establish their mathematical conditions for the emergence of cooperation. Such conditions uncover the impact of both higher-order strategy updates and network properties on evolutionary outcomes, notably highlighting the enhancement of cooperation by overlaps between groups. Interestingly, we discover that the group-mutual comparison update \u2013 selecting a high-fitness group and then imitating a random individual within this group \u2013 can prominently promote cooperation. Our analyses further unveil that, compared to pairwise interactions, higher-order strategy updates generally improve cooperation in most higher-order networks. These findings underscore the pivotal role of higher-order strategy updates in fostering collective cooperation in complex social systems.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1371\/journal.pcbi.1012891","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,8,4]],"date-time":"2025-08-04T17:42:37Z","timestamp":1754329357000},"page":"e1012891","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1371\/journal.pcbi.corrections_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":5,"title":["Emergence of cooperation promoted by higher-order strategy updates"],"prefix":"10.1371","volume":"21","author":[{"given":"Dini","family":"Wang","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-2494-1505","authenticated-orcid":true,"given":"Peng","family":"Yi","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Yiguang","family":"Hong","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Jie","family":"Chen","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Gang","family":"Yan","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"340","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2025,8,4]]},"reference":[{"issue":"1","key":"pcbi.1012891.ref001","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1","DOI":"10.1016\/0022-5193(64)90038-4","article-title":"The genetical evolution of social behaviour. 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