  Human societies are organized and developed through collective cooperative
behaviors, in which interactions between individuals are governed by the
underlying social connections. It is well known that, based on the information
in their environment, individuals can form collective cooperation by
strategically imitating superior behaviors and changing unfavorable
surroundings in self-organizing ways. However, facing the tough situation that
some humans and social bots keep spreading misinformation, we still lack the
systematic investigation on the impact of such proliferation of misinformation
on the evolution of social cooperation. Here we study this problem by virtue of
classical evolutionary game theory. We find that misinformation generally
impedes the emergence of collective cooperation compared to scenarios with
completely true information, although the level of cooperation is slightly
higher when the benefits provided by cooperators are reduced below a proven
threshold. We further show that this possible advantage shrinks as social
connections become denser, suggesting that misinformation is more detrimental
to the formation of collective cooperation when 'social viscosity' is low. Our
results uncover the quantitative effect of misinformation on the social
cooperative behavior in the complex networked society, and pave the way for
designing possible interventions to improve collective cooperation.
