  This paper provides a behavioral analysis of conservatism in beliefs. I
introduce a new axiom, Dynamic Conservatism, that relaxes Dynamic Consistency
when information and prior beliefs "conflict." When the agent is a subjective
expected utility maximizer, Dynamic Conservatism implies that conditional
beliefs are a convex combination of the prior and the Bayesian posterior.
Conservatism may result in belief dynamics consistent with confirmation bias,
representativeness, and the good news-bad news effect, suggesting a deeper
behavioral connection between these biases. An index of conservatism and a
notion of comparative conservatism are characterized. Finally, I extend
conservatism to the case of an agent with incomplete preferences that admit a
multiple priors representation.
