Looking for social class in all the wrong places: differences in social support emerge reliably between-but not within-class contexts.

Despite theorizing that cultural phenomena reflect collective processes, psychologists often analyze such phenomena at the individual level. This approach can skew conclusions by obscuring processes that unfold between-rather than within-group contexts. To demonstrate the importance of studying cultural effects at the group level, we examine a key tenet of sociocultural models of social class: an inverse relationship between class and social support. Across two datasets (Ntotal  = 3,347), individual-level linear and nonlinear models revealed weak and inconsistent associations between class indicators and social support. However, when latent profile analysis (LPA) was used to model associations at the level of class groups, we reliably observed a working-class profile displaying higher levels of social support than a middle/upper-class profile. Corroborating the idea that poverty is associated with social isolation, we also identified an "underclass" profile combining extreme deprivation with low levels of social support. Our work underscores that class-cultural differences constitute group-level phenomena that may prove undetectable at the individual level.