Voluntary strategy suppresses the positive impact of preferential selection in prisoner’s dilemma

Impact of aspiration is ubiquitous in social and biological disciplines. In this work, we try to explore the impact of such a trait on voluntary prisoners’ dilemma game via a selection parameter w . w = 0 returns the traditional version of random selection. For positive w , the opponent of high payoff will be selected; while negative w means that the partner of low payoff will be chosen. We find that for positive w , cooperation will be greatly promoted in the interval of small b , at variance cooperation is inhibited with large b . For negative w , cooperation is fully restrained, irrespective of b value. It is found that the positive impact of preferential selection is suppressed by the voluntary strategy in prisoner’s dilemma. These observations can be supported by the spatial patterns. Our work may shed light on the emergence and persistence of cooperation with voluntary participation in social dilemma.