What is Cultural consensus theory?

Cultural consensus theory is an approach to information pooling which supports a framework for the measurement and evaluation of beliefs as cultural; shared to some extent by a group of individuals. Cultural consensus models guide the aggregation of responses from individuals to estimate the culturally appropriate answers to a series of related questions and individual competence in answering those questions. The theory is applicable when there is sufficient agreement across people to assume that a single set of answers exists. The agreement between pairs of individuals is used to estimate individual cultural competence. Answers are estimated by weighting responses of individuals by their competence and then combining responses.