Saying that I think the story really happened is an exaggeration in my case. Obviously I recognized that the story was false strongly enough for me to know that

Saying that I think the story really happened is an exaggeration in my case. Obviously I recognized that the story was false strongly enough for me to know that I should put my skepticism filters on. I knew intellectually the story didn't happen soon after starting reading, from the style of writing. But it took extra, conscious effort to ensure that that understanding was shared by my more base word-understanding mind, too. Basically, I read in words as truth, and have to manually tag each thought as "dubious" after reading them. Or perhaps I would still disbelieve what I read even if I didn't consciously attempt to disbelieve it, but consciously disbelieving what I read is a much-practiced habit that I would find hard to stop, so I still prefer straightforwardly-presented arguments to fictional-story arguments. Apart from that misunderstanding, I do find it plausible that, as you hypothesize, most people need less effort to disbelieve what they read than me.