The United Nations and the Rationale for Collective Intelligence ...

suggests, more or less, a need to broaden the parameter of the study to include ideas from a wide range of disciplines. For this reason, and from a methodological point of view, maintaining a degree of consistency in applying foreign tools in specific contexts requires that the situation in which a term is used is clearly defined.

Furthermore, an often ignored problem in research design is the failure to state the exact purpose of a study and how certain terms or contexts define the expected outcome of the study. For example, it would be useful to clearly state whether a study's end goal is to describe known or unknown phenomena, in which case its aims would be to provide a rich picture of the situation under study, or serve as a mapping or diagnostic tool that may point to where a solution could be found but falls short of offering a possible solution to a problem. A prescriptive approach, then, would aim to be exclusively concerned with examining the nature of the problem with a view to recommending a possible solution.¹ It would be inconceivable to suggest that any one of these approaches is superior to the other since each may perform different though complementary functions. Nonetheless, danger lurks where a descriptive theory is taken to represent both the problem and the solution, and specific terms or tools overlap and provide many meanings. One consequence of this error in analysing social settings is the possibility of the impression that all social problems have common root causes or that a certain social situation has common relevance to every other social situation. An obvious example here is the commonly held view in the IR discipline that most social interactions occur in an intractable environment, thereby generalising that cooperative endeavours cannot be achieved since actors in social bargaining are likely to act rationally. Going by this view, it is possible to see where the idea of UN intelligence presents an extreme case that cannot be reconciled and that makes such a system infeasible.

Case in point is the application of game theory to the analysis of social interaction and collective action problems. Concepts such as these tend to be applied in a rather simplistic fashion that present a static and shortsighted picture of both the problems and the solutions.