Higher-order interactions have recently emerged as a promising framework for describing new dynamical phenomena in heterogeneous contagion processes. However, a fundamental open question is how to understand their contribution from the perspective of the physics of critical phenomena. Based on a mesoscopic field-theoretic Langevin description, we show that (i) pairwise mechanisms such as facilitation or thresholding are formally equivalent to higher-order ones, (ii) pairwise interactions at coarse-grained scales govern the simplicial contact process and, (iii) the interplay between noise and topology is determined by the network spectral dimension. In short, we demonstrate that classical field theories, rooted in model symmetries and/or network dimensionality, capture the nature of the phase transition in real and synthetic networks.

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• Collective behavior in networks
• Continuous phase transition
• Discontinuous phase transition
• Network phase transitions
• Spreading
• Critical phenomena
• SIS model
• Spreading models