Dispositions: what you bring to the conversation

Supports Intellectual Humility

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  Intellectual humility as a measurable disposition

  What it established. Intellectual humility — recognising that one's beliefs may be wrong — behaves as a measurable individual difference, distinct from general humility and from low confidence, and predicts how people handle evidence that contradicts them.

  What it licenses here. Treating humility as a disposition that varies between people and can be measured, rather than as advice. It also supplies the boundary: intellectual humility is not diffidence, so the model must not score low confidence as if it were humility.

  Leary, M. R., Diebels, K. J., Davisson, E. K., & Jongman-Sereno, K. P. (2017). Cognitive and interpersonal features of intellectual humility. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 43(6), 793–813. Source

Supports Internal Locus of Evaluation

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  Where a person locates the standard

  What it established. People differ stably in whether they attribute outcomes to their own action or to forces outside them, and that generalized expectancy shapes how they respond to feedback.

  What it licenses here. The idea that where a person locates the standard of judgment is a durable trait-like tendency rather than a momentary mood. Rotter is about control over outcomes, not evaluation of quality; the model borrows the internal-versus-external structure, not the construct itself, and the disposition here is specifically about who decides whether an answer is good.

  Rotter, J. B. (1966). Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 80(1), 1–28. Source

Supports Investment in Process

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  Effortful retrieval beats fluent restudy

  What it established. Retrieving material is more effective for long-term retention than restudying it, even though restudying feels more productive at the time and learners predict the opposite.

  What it licenses here. The core of this disposition, and the reason it is hard: the feeling of learning and the fact of learning come apart, and AI is very good at producing the feeling. It does not license claiming that any particular AI workflow is a retrieval practice; that is an empirical question this model has not answered.

  Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255. Source

Supports Tolerance for Ambiguity

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  Ambiguity as a stable personality variable

  What it established. The tendency to perceive ambiguous situations as threatening rather than desirable is a stable individual difference, measurable and distinct from anxiety in general.

  What it licenses here. Why some people close a question down at the first plausible answer and others keep it open. It is one of the oldest constructs in the set and its measures have been criticised since; the model uses the concept, and does not adopt Budner's scale.

  Budner, S. (1962). Intolerance of ambiguity as a personality variable. Journal of Personality, 30(1), 29–50. Source

Supports Tinkering Disposition

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  Tinkering as a legitimate epistemology

  What it established. Working by negotiation with materials — trying, watching, adjusting — is a coherent way of knowing rather than a deficient version of planning from the top down, and it is systematically undervalued in computing.

  What it licenses here. Treating tinkering as a disposition worth cultivating rather than as impatience. It matters here because iterative and single-shot users extract very different value from the same model, and the difference is not skill.

  Turkle, S., & Papert, S. (1990). Epistemological pluralism: Styles and voices within the computer culture. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 16(1), 128–157. Source