In cognitive psychology and decision science, conservatism or conservatism bias is a bias in human information processing. This bias describes human belief revision in which persons over-weigh the prior distribution (base rate) and under-weigh new sample evidence when compared to Bayesian belief-revision.
According to the theory, “opinion change is very orderly, and usually proportional to the numbers of Bayes’ Theorem – but it is insufficient in amount”. In other words, persons update their prior beliefs as new evidence becomes observed, but they do so more slowly than they would if they used Bayes’ theorem.
The above text is retrieved from the Wikipedia article “Conservatism Bias“,which has been released under theGNU Free Documentation License. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply.
ScienceSwitch 