Expectation driven by update willingness promotes cooperation in the spatial prisoner's dilemma game

In real life, everyone is full of yearning and pursuit for future life. The difference between reality and ideals encourage people to constantly adjust the current state, so that they can better adapt to changes in the surrounding environment. Thus, we propose a spatial prisoner's dilemma game model where individuals have expectation towards the payoff obtained from nearest neighbors, and individuals can adaptively adjust their update willingness based on the satisfaction of income. Through numerical calculation, we find that different b values will have an appropriate aspiration level to promote cooperation. In addition, the results have an obvious phase transition phenomenon for individual's aspiration level on promoting cooperation. Moreover, only moderate aspiration level can promote the evolution of cooperative behavior, due to it can lead to the heterogeneous distribution of update willingness, which will be beneficial to the evolution of cooperation. (C) 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.