> I feel this is an unwritten rule of conversation in general.
There is a bit of cognitive dissonance that I observe.
It indeed is an unwritten rule. Most people agree with this rule.
Yet wait a while after the conversation, and people who listened treat the story as a lot more factual than what that rule implies, and more than they themselves believed it in the moment. The only antidote I have seen to prevent this transformation is to always be skeptical (without being judgmental):
"It was a fun conversation, and the guy/story is probably full of shit."
> The storyteller merely needs to say "Yeah, some of the details are probably off" .
I feel this is an unwritten rule of conversation in general. It certainly is amongst my friend groups, even recounting stories where we were all present. It obviously wouldn't work for debates, or if you were discussing things like political policy, but most conversations don't fall into those types of things. Just sitting around shooting the shit.