Aspiration promotes cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma game with the imitation rule.

A model of stochastic evolutionary game dynamics with finite population of size N+M was built. Among these individuals, N individuals update strategies with aspiration updating, while the other M individuals update strategies with imitation updating. In the proposed model, we obtain the expression of the mean fraction of cooperators and analyze some concrete cases. Compared with the standard imitation dynamics, there is always a positive probability to support the formation of cooperation in the system with the aspiration and imitation rules. Moreover, the numerical results indicate that more aspiration-driven individuals lead to a higher mean fraction of imitation-driven cooperators, which means the invasion of the aspiration-driven individuals is conducive to promoting the cooperation of the imitation-driven individuals.