London: Well-educated people often presume they are more left wing than they actually are and are also less able to recognize their conservative tendencies, research says.

Well-educated people tend to socialize with others who have conservative views and their perception of where the ideological middle ground lies is skewed, wrote James Rockey, economics lecturer at the University of Leicester, the Telegraph reports.

However, earning a high salary can jolt employees into a better awareness of where they sit in the political spectrum, he added.

"Politics is social," Rockey said. "There are two main factors - the first is that people compare themselves not to the population as a whole but to the people they know; the second is that political preferences change over time."

According to his theory, a well-educated person, who spent his student days protesting for left-wing causes in the 1980s, may still perceive their political allegiances as being left-wing even if their ideological views have shifted further to the right in recent years.

The paper is based on a study of 136,000 respondents, held by the World Values Survey (WVS). The data was gathered in 48 different countries, during five periods between 1981 and 2008.

Respondents were first asked to rate themselves on a scale of 1-10, with 1 signifying left-wing and 10 signifying right-wing, to assess how they perceive their own political beliefs.

These self-perceptions were then compared with indicators of the respondents' actual ideological position.

This was established by asking them whether they believed wealth should be divided more equally.

Rockey's paper also found differences between self-perception and ideological beliefs based on a number of other factors, including gender, race and geographical location. IANS