Another way of looking at it might be that one group has a lot of common sense and experience, and the other group tends toward being gullible and foolhardy.

As we mature, we tend to make fewer stupid mistakes (never "none" unfortunately), and realize that "I'll try anything once" sounds good when you're eighteen, but after a few years you find out how that works out.

The phrase "change is good" doesn't hold up under examination. As anyone with sense could tell you, change can be good or bad, and change for its own sake is one hallmark of immaturity.

The healthy human animal is a balance of curiosity and caution. If we weren't open to change at all, we'd still be pounding rocks together. If everything new and different had been considered good, we might have have been wiped out by a batch of colorful unknown mushrooms.

Human progress is a luxury of an environment that is relatively safe. A child is more open to new experiences when he's grown up in a warm, safe environment. You get Isaac Newtons in societies where Newton doesn't need to worry about his village being burned or the hunt going badly. "Primitive" societies aren't that way because the people are stupid. They don't have the time for anything else. One of many theories on human progress is that when people moved to places where there were seasons, they finally got some time.

You don't get "hippies" anywhere else but in the hammock of a prosperous Western civilization.

Experience. A person who startles easily may have had things happen to them that were worth startling over, as the article on the subject points out. Immigrants in my area from former Communist nations tend to be conservative. Any idea why?

"A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged" is only a cute saying, but its underlying concept makes a point.

Houston just had a "change."