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This article explores the relation of culture to consumption by invest
igating individual, social, and cultural sources of variation in the s
haring of causal reasoning about behavior in two microcultures. The re
sults suggest (1) the importance of intracultural variation in the stu
dy of culture, (2) differences between experts and novices as a robust
source of this variation, (3) novel insights into the relationship be
tween expertise and sociocultural phenomena, and (4) the potential for
investigating attitude structure, categorization, and attribution as
products of causal reasoning originating from cultural belief systems.
The study also demonstrates the synergy created by diverse research m
ethods.