Does Successful Small-Scale Coordination Help or Hinder Coordination at Larger Scales?

When we invoke group-level processes like cooperation or coordination, we usually model them as operating either over the set of dyads or at the scale of the whole group. But an individual can interact with the same set of people over many different scales simultaneously. Four people might maintain interactions over any combination of the six possible dyads relating their pairs, the four triads relating their subsets of the three, and the polyad of order four relating them all. What is the relationship between different interaction scales, and how might they interact? The different possible answers to this question reveal conflicting intuitions about group processes.We devised a four-player, multi-strategy experimental paradigm in which participants chose not just whether to coordinate, but with whom, and at what scale. Our results reveal coordination behavior with such a strong preference for dyads that undermining coordination between pairs of participants actually facilitates coordination at the scale of the group. We present these findings as experimental evidence for competition, as opposed to complementarity, between different scales of multi-player coordination. This result undermines a basic premise of approaches in network science that rely on dyad-scale structure as a proxy for group-scale order