I was reading Yvain's Generalizing from One Example, which talks about the typical mind fallacy. Basically, it describes how humans assume that all other humans are like them. If a person doesn't cheat on tests, they are more likely to assume others won't cheat on tests either. If a person sees mental images, they'll be more likely to assume that everyone else sees mental images.
As I'm wont to do, I was thinking about how to make that theory pay rent. It occurred to me that this could definitely be exploitable. If the typical mind fallacy is correct, we should be able to have it go the other way; we can derive information about a person's proclivities based on what they think about other people.
Eg, most employers ask "have you ever stolen from a job before," and have to deal with misreporting because nobody in their right mind will say yes. However, imagine if the typical mind fallacy was correct. The employers could instead ask "what do you think the percentage of employees who have stolen from their job is?" and know that the applicants who responded higher than average were correspondingly more likely to steal, and the applicants who responded lower than average were less likely to cheat. It could cut through all sorts of social desirability distortion effects. You couldn't get the exact likelihood, but it would give more useful information than you would get with a direct question.
In hindsight, which is always 20/20, it seems incredibly obvious. I'd be surprised if professional personality tests and sociologists aren't using these types of questions. My google-fu shows no hits, but it's possible I'm just not using the correct term that sociologists use. I'm was wondering if anyone had heard of this questioning method before, and if there's any good research data out there showing just how much you can infer from someone's deviance from the median response.
I think the heart of the disagreement is that your beliefs about communication are wildly divergent from my beliefs about communication. You mention communication as some sort of innately good thing that can be corrupted by speakers.
I'm of the school of thought that all language is about deception and signaling. Our current language is part of a never ending arms race between lies, status relationships, and the need to get some useful information across. The whole idea that you could have a tragedy of the commons seems odd to me. A new lying or lie detection method is invented, we use it until people learn the signal or how to signal around it, then we adopt some other clever technique. It's been this way since Ogg first learned he could trick his opponent by saying "Ogg no smash!"
If you hold that language is sacred, then this technique is bad. If you hold that language is a perpetual arms race of deception and counter-deception, this is just another technique that will be used until it's no longer useful.
A fundamental technique of this arms race is honestly consciously believing in your lies. So given the OP's proposal, which incentives conscious lying, people feel uncomfortable.
The thing that can be corrupted is the general level of trust in conversation - if you're not lying and you're reasonably certain the other person also isn't lying (consciously), you can relax (consciously), and that feels good. So we don't like proposals for new social techniques or conventions where to get ahead (be hired) we would have to lie more than we think we do now.