Acceptability of strategy promotes cooperation in a spatial prisoner’s dilemma game

Abstract

The emotions of individuals are one of the most important factors for affecting cooperation in human society. An individual’s acceptability of her/his own strategy, as one kind of powerful emotion that can be influenced by the neighbors’ strategies, can prompt the individual to adjust her/his strategy in the evolution process of a spatial game. Based on this fact, a spatial prisoner’s dilemma game with acceptability involved is studied in this paper. The average acceptability in the community is introduced to the individual’s fitness in the model. The numerical experiments show that individuals considering average acceptability can greatly facilitate cooperation under certain conditions. Furthermore, when the temptation value is small, rational individuals to blind conformity behavior can promote cooperative behavior, but for a high temptation value, rational individuals are not conducive to cooperation. These results may offer insights to comprehensively understand the mechanism of emotion promoting cooperation.