Investigating the Relationship between Religious Attitude and Perceptual Errors in Stock Exchange Investors

The perceptual error of the investors is one of the issues discussed in behavioral finance. The perceptual error is a wrong sensual or perceptual error. That is, what we see or hear does not match with the reality. Regarding the fact that the perception of individuals is affected by their worldview and beliefs and religious attitudes can also affect their viewpoint, in this study, the relationship between these two variables was investigated. The study used an applied-survey method. The instrument of the study was a questionnaire and the subjects of the study were 200 individuals who were randomly chosen from individual investors, the experts of investment institutes, stock brokers on stock exchange and stock exchange organization across the country (Iran) in 2016. The data were analyzed using SPSS software. After investigating the normality of the data, Pearson correlation formula was used to investigate the relationship between the variables in the form of 1 main hypothesis and 5 sub-hypotheses. The results indicated that there was no significant relationship between religious attitude and Perceptual error but there was a negative and significant relationship between religious attitude and overconfidence. There was also no significant relationship between religious attitude and hindsight, escalation of commitment, availability and randomness. Investigation of transposition of perceptual errors, using Friedman test, indicated that most of the errors were related to availability error and least of them were related to overconfidence error.