  The diversity in wealth and social status is present not only among humans,
but throughout the animal world. We account for this observation by generating
random variables that determ ine the social diversity of players engaging in
the prisoner's dilemma game. Here the term social diversity is used to address
extrinsic factors that determine the mapping of game pay offs to individual
fitness. These factors may increase or decrease the fitness of a player
depending on its location on the spatial grid. We consider different
distributions of extrin sic factors that determine the social diversity of
players, and find that the power-law distribution enables the best promotion of
cooperation. The facilitation of the cooperative str ategy relies mostly on the
inhomogeneous social state of players, resulting in the formation of
cooperative clusters which are ruled by socially high-ranking players that are
able to prevail against the defectors even when there is a large temptation to
defect. To confirm this, we also study the impact of spatially correlated
social diversity and find that coopera tion deteriorates as the spatial
correlation length increases. Our results suggest that the distribution of
wealth and social status might have played a crucial role by the evolution of
cooperation amongst egoistic individuals.
