Competence,Agreement,and Luck

Abstract

The cultural consensus model (CCM) is a frequently used model of cultural diversity, which predicts how individuals from a common cultural background would share knowledge in a specific domain. Cultural competence, or the degree to which an individual agrees with a local cultural truth, is a central concept in CCM, and many uses of competence estimates rest on the assumption that they reflect real variation among individuals in their knowledge of a cultural truth. However, Weller has shown that even in situations where there are no real differences among individuals in their underlying competences, the CCM will still estimate individual competences that appear to vary, sometimes substantially. To address this issue, we describe a test of the null hypothesis that there is no real difference in competence among individuals. We also present tables with specific cutoffs for this test across a range of data set characteristics. These can help researchers decide whether a specific set of data warrants further analyses of individual differences in competence.