Evaluating fitness by integrating the highest payoff within the neighborhood promotes cooperation in social dilemmas

In this paper, we propose a modified fitness evaluation mechanism, which integrates the environmental factors into the focal player’s fitness calculation, to investigate the evolution of cooperative behaviors in the prisoner’s dilemma game. Here, the fitness of a player is computed by combining the individual raw payoff and the highest payoff within the neighborhood, which is regulated by a single parameter termed as trust level η . We show, compared to the traditional version ( η = 0 ), that the cooperation level can be highly enhanced for η > 0 . Meanwhile, we illustrate the dynamical evolution of cooperators on the square lattice, and for different defection parameters b the F C − K curves are utilized to investigate the impact of noise during the strategy updates. Likely, the role of pursuing the highest payoff within the neighborhood also favors the survival of cooperators in the spatial snowdrift game. In addition, the sensibility of knowing the external factors is often not identical for all individuals and we consider the distributed trust level in which η is a distributed parameter, and the results indicate that pursuing the highest payoff in the neighborhood is also inspiring as a consequence of its positive effect on cooperation. The current results are highly instructive for us to further understand the maintenance and emergence of cooperation under the framework of evolutionary game theory.