This is used in assessing stories from history as well - a story with aspects that reflect poorly on the hero is considered to be more likely to be truthful than one that lauds the hero in all things.
It makes sense, I just am trying to figure out if there is a reasonable way to numerically denote this characteristic.
Deep learning! It does everything really well, especially reducing complex problems to a single number. It's well known that anything which doesn't fit in the reals isn't really real, if you know what I mean.