A Protocol for Human Attribution Ratings to Self-Referential LLM Outputs: Candidate Cue Structure as a Design Input

Abstract

Study protocol and planned preregistration draft; data collection not begun. AI-assistance disclosure: large language models were used, under the author's direction and review, for drafting/editing assistance, literature search and bibliographic verification, and (where applicable) research-engineering of governed pipelines; in the empirical SROP studies LLMs additionally appear as the subject of study and (in the qualification study and the mechanistic negative result) as measurement instruments, as described in each paper's Methods. No AI system is an author; the human author bears sole responsibility for content. Version notes: retitled off the Theory-of-Mind co-headline; protocol/Stage-1 draft, no human data collected.