Cooperation and popularity in spatial games

Selection of the competition opponent is crucial for the evolution of cooperation in evolutionary games. In this work, we introduce a simple rule, incorporating individual popularity via the single parameter α, to study how the selection of the potential strategy sources influences individual behavior traits. For positive α players with high popularity will be considered more likely, while for negative α the opposite holds. Setting α equal to zero returns the frequently adopted random selection of the opponent. We find that positive α (namely, adopting the strategy from a more popular player) promotes the emergence of cooperation, which is robust against different interaction networks and game classes. The essence of this boosting effect can be attributed to the fact: increasing α accelerates the microscopic organization of cooperator clusters to resist the exploitation of defectors. Moreover, we also demonstrated that the introduction of a new mechanism alters the impact of uncertainty by strategy adoption on the evolution of cooperation. We thus present a viable method of understanding the ubiquitous cooperative behaviors in nature and hope that it will inspire further studies to resolve social dilemmas.