What do open or readable reader studies show about how and when audiences notice, trust or distrust unreliable narrators?

Only two reader experiments were found and both are narrow. A 2025 open-access questionnaire study (148 students, one Japanese short story in six orderings) found that readers revise trust when they notice inconsistencies, lean heavily on social roles and genre labels, that story order shaped whom they distrusted but not whom they trusted most, and that reading expertise did not predict trust. A 2022 experiment found that a narrator framed as credible led readers to reproduce and endorse more false facts than a narrator framed as unreliable. Neither measures when in the text readers first notice a problem. Curator qualifications: Verified the study details. A same-work statement conflict is confirmed (Amendment 11): the Tilburg repository cover page bars further distribution, while the article itself states CC BY. Input for L00: the CC BY statement is printed in the article front matter (publisher licence); the cover page is the repository's generic policy. No determination made. Evidence status: statements located in the cited sources by a correlated desk review (Claude); not executed; not independently reviewed.

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