Cooperation and popularity in spatial games

•In spatial games, neighbors strategies are preferentially selected based on their popularity.•Popularity-driven selection mechanism can enhance the level of cooperation remarkably.•The effectiveness of such a mechanism is verified by the snowdrift game and the different structures of networks.

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 αα, to study how the selection of the potential strategy sources influences individual behavior traits. For positive αα players with high popularity will be considered more likely, while for negative αα the opposite holds. Setting αα equal to zero returns the frequently adopted random selection of the opponent. We find that positive αα (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 αα 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.