This is interesting. I have found that when you are like 16, you often want everything to be super logical and everything that is not feels stupid. And growing up largely means accepting "common sense", which at the end of the day means relying more on pattern recognition. (This is also politically relevant - young radicalism is often about matching everything with a logical sounding ideology, while people when they grow and become more moderate simply care about what typical patterns tend to result in human flourishing more than about ideology.)

There is something in pattern recognition that feels pretty "conservative" in the not-too-political sense. Logical reasoning is an individualistic thing, you can make your own philosophy of things especially if you are young and feel you are so much smarter than everybody else. But if you treat your brain as a pattern sensor, it is different.

First of all experience matters more than sheer brightness. You start to think less and less that old people are dinosauric fools and respect them more and more. (Of course the right kind of experience matters more than just clocking in a lot of birthdays. There are 19 years old guys who are so fanatic about cars that they spend day and night working on them and probably know why your car does not run well than your dad does.)

Second, throwing a lot of brains on the patterns i.e. actually listening to other people's opinions starts to look good. It scales differently. You can feel you can out-reason and out-logic a thousand people because logic is not additive. But being a sensor its. When hunting for a detail, you cannot out-see two thousand eyeballs. So you start to respect other people's opinions more.

Third, there are depositories of recognized patterns. They are usually called best practices, accepted practices or even traditions. They start to matter.

It is a very sobering experience, and for me it was kind of painful (because humiliating, deflating), it happened between 21 and 26.

It is turning people more conservative in the not-so-political sense and it is probably a good thing, at least I think it made me better off, although it was painful. For example, in architecture, do you value bravely tradition bucking original design, or you value traditional pattern-book architecture? Scruton argues the later is more likely to create an environment in which people feel good.