We should be careful how we bandy about the word "conservative",
we risk making a linguistic or category error. I consider myself a very conservative individual, I dislike change, particularly change for change's sake. I think that if it works it shouldn't be fixed, and any modification to existing procedure, even if utimately justified, will require a long period of trial and break-in. I am uncomfortable with new situations and I am convinced that the familiarity with the old ways one develops over time often more than makes up for the confusion induced and training required by new methods, even if they are inherently more efficient. I don't like to take chances and I have a pessimistic view of the world, my glass is always half-empty and I think threats abound everywhere around me.

In short, I subscribe to all the conservative stereotypes, EXCEPT in the political sphere. And the reason for this is modern conservatism doesn't resist change and the new, it is activist and reactionary, it wants to reinstate old ways from a long-gone time, it wants to abandon those changes that have been around for generations, that have been proven and adjusted to by society, and return to its conception of what an idealized past used to be like. Political conservatism isn't about the past, although they do stress a carefully edited and packaged version of it . Modern conservatives are much more interested in the future they are trying to forge for their own interests, not in some nostalgic yesterday that never existed.

I would be very careful about conflating psychological or cultural behavior with political agendas, I don't think they have anything to do with each other, we just use the same word to describe them.