IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-05773897.html

Young children build consensus in networks with local information

Author

Listed:
  • Isabelle Brocas

    (USC - University of Southern California, IAST - Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, CEPR - Center for Economic Policy Research)

  • Juan D. Carrillo

    (USC - University of Southern California, IAST - Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, CEPR - Center for Economic Policy Research)

  • Ulysses Rios

    (USC - University of Southern California)

Abstract

How is consensus reached in groups with limited access to information? Here we run a controlled laboratory experiment with very young children (ages 5–8 years, N = 150) in the USA to identify the attributes that support consensus building. Success is facilitated by two factors. The first is the endogenous adoption of heterogeneous roles: a leader who proposes a solution, a group of debaters who consider the alternatives, and a closer who locks the decision. The second is flexibility in the decision rule, with participants following the wisdom of the crowd with high probability, but not with certainty. These two characteristics allow young children to outperform simple computational algorithms, especially in the more complex conditions with limited observability of the network: children converged 74% of the time, compared with 35% for the algorithm (χ2(1) = 59.83, P

Suggested Citation

  • Isabelle Brocas & Juan D. Carrillo & Ulysses Rios, 2026. "Young children build consensus in networks with local information," Post-Print hal-05773897, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05773897
    DOI: 10.1038/s41562-026-02449-w
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05773897. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.