So let's start with some research that you did at a level that we understand pretty well here at HBR, which is coworkers and social position.

What do we know about how people perceive the income of people around them, like in their own communities or their own circles?

Yeah, that's a great question because, in the policy debate, an issue that comes up a lot is about relative incomes and how you perceive yourself relative to others.

So it's not just about how much do you make in absolute, what's your absolute income level, but also about where are you relative to others around you?

And that can shape people's fairness considerations and views on policies.

And so we were interested in finding out how much people actually know about how they rank relative to others, and we're interested in various, what you may call, reference groups.

So various groups that may be relevant to your perceptions, like people with the same age as you, people who live in your city, people with the same level of education or in the same sector of work, but also smaller groups like your immediate neighbors or your coworkers at your workplace, even your former schoolmates you went to school with, et cetera.

And what we see is that in general, there's this systematic misperception whereby people who are lower in any given group tend to place themselves higher.

And the reason they do this is because they do not realize how high the incomes of others are.

So if you yourself are lower income, you'll tend to think everyone else has lower too.