Social cognition comprises a set of neural processes that allow animals to understand, interact and predict the behavior of others1. The more developed an animal’s social cognitive abilities, the better equipped it is to thrive in society2 and to survive in nature3. Furthermore, lacking social cognitive abilities can signal detrimental mental health conditions2. Traditional research into the neural mechanisms of social behaviors has focused on studying brain activity during one-on-one interactions. From these studies, different brain regions have been identified as important for social recognition (such as the hippocampus -HC), aggression (such as the lateral septum -LS) or hierarchy (such as the anterior cingulate of the prefrontal cortex -ACC) (refs). However, there are key aspects of social cognition that require the integration of more than one of those features and only emerge from group behavior.