About a month ago, we asked readers to guess where they sat on the income scale, and then compare their answer with reality, using census data.

Key points: Lower-income earners were better at estimating their position among other Australians than higher-income earners

Lower-income earners were better at estimating their position among other Australians than higher-income earners The vast majority of people got it wrong, with only 11 per cent guessing correctly

The vast majority of people got it wrong, with only 11 per cent guessing correctly But 50 per cent of people answered either correctly or within two income brackets of their own

Hundreds of thousands of people had a go at guessing their place.

We captured this anonymised data and compared people's expectations versus reality. Here's what we found.

What the other half thinks

The interactive divided people into 13 income bands, corresponding to the bands in the Australian Bureau of Statistics' data.

People were asked to estimate which bracket they sat in, and were then asked to enter their weekly take-home pay.

After removing certain outliers with outlandish responses (we're looking at you, Mr or Ms $1 trillion a week) there was a marked difference between those in the top and bottom halves of the income distribution when it came to estimating their place.

Respondents in the top seven brackets (earning more than $800 per week) fared far worse at guessing their place than those in the bottom six brackets. In fact, our lower-earning respondents were 2.6 times better at estimating their place than their higher-earning counterparts.

Each of these groups contains roughly 50 per cent of income earners, according to the census.

But it was those in the third-highest bracket — earning between $1,750 and $2,000 per week — who fared the worst at estimating their position.

Only 2.85 per cent of respondents in this bracket correctly identified their place and the average guess was 3.2 brackets lower than reality.

The best set of respondents on this measure were those in the fourth-lowest bracket, earning between $400 and $499 per week.

Just under a quarter of them managed to get it right.

In the highest bracket — those earning more than $3,000 per week — 10.2 per cent of respondents estimated correctly, just below the average of 11 per cent.

At this point, it is worth noting that the default position for respondents' guesses and actual income was set in the bottom half of the distribution, in the sixth-lowest bracket.

This is likely to have skewed the results somewhat, as an unknown amount of respondents will have stuck with the default, which would result in a correct response.

After removing respondents in the sixth-lowest bracket from the results of the lower-income earners, 20.8 per cent of people guessed correctly.

Most people don't know their place

Only 11 per cent of people accurately estimated the income band in which they sat.

A further 18 per cent guessed one bracket either side, for a total of 29 per cent of people guessing within one bracket of their own.

But most people who responded underestimated their bracket.

Fifty per cent of respondents underestimated their bracket between two and four places; the average of all respondents was an underestimation of 2.4 brackets.

So it would seem that perhaps Australians are richer than they think they are. Not so, according to Christopher Hoy, a research fellow at Australian National University.

He said there would be a great deal of selection bias amongst the respondents which would skew the results, and that according to his research, most people — rich or poor — thought they were in the middle.

"We call it a median bias," he said.

"In a truly nationally representative survey, the average would be in the middle".

Indeed, our average result was likely skewed by the higher proportion of higher-income earners who entered a response.

When we look at our results in absolute terms — the number of brackets, positive or negative, between estimate and reality — respondents' guesses were out one way or the other by an average of 2.7 brackets; just over 50 per cent of people answered within two brackets of their own.

Mr Hoy said people generally found it difficult to see the bigger picture, and often extrapolated their local situation to the national.

"They don't fully appreciate the order of magnitude in which this takes place," he said.

"If you're in Mosman but you thought you were the average … [you're] thinking relative to the people in Mosman and inferring what the national average is."

Income and ideology

Mr Hoy's research found that almost 95 per cent of people "misperceive either the level of inequality in Australia and/or their position in the national income distribution," meaning about 5 per cent of people typically perceived their position correctly.

It is worth noting the discrepancy between Mr Hoy's survey and ours could be due to the default answers problem, which we raised before.

Mr Hoy's survey also found misperceptions of inequality and position were strongly correlated with the voting preferences of respondents.

"Poorer right-wing voters tend to overestimate their place more than poorer left-wing voters … richer right-wing voters tend to underestimate their place more so than richer left-wing voters," he told ABC News Story Lab.

He said this was important, because, as his research showed, people were more likely to be in favour of income redistribution when they find out they were poorer than they thought they were, and this was true "particularly among right-wing voters".