Consensus Emergence as a Dynamic Concept: Bridging the Gap Between the Theoretical Concept and its Empirical Estimation

Some of the most influential theories in psychology describe multilevel processes based on dynamic concepts, often with emerging properties. This article aims to provide a precise mathematical definition of consensus emergence, a central concept in such theories. The definition can close the gap between the theoretical definition of consensus emergence and the quantities measured in empirical studies. Empirical studies on the emergence of consensus in the team and group literature can produce new insights when researchers explicitly consider several critical conceptual and methodological issues. Using this definition, we can clarify several issues in modeling consensus emergence in multilevel models. We illustrate this by three potential pitfalls (identifiability, inappropriate statistics, and model misspecification) in estimating consensus emergence in empirical studies and give recommendations on how to avoid them.