From the metallurgical plant located in Cherepovets, messages come over and over again: after printing testing, the orderly ranks of employees of the commercial management of the enterprise noticeably thinned out, and when a lie detector was used in the coping shop of the same enterprise, the threat of dismissal hung over several dozen employees belonging to the junior and middle management personnel. And so every day. The enthusiasm with which I use the polygraph at Severstal and similar enterprises makes me think about many things at the same time. Firstly, there, especially in these units, things really aren’t all that great. Human nature is difficult to change, and if he already has the opportunity to give something away, he will not take advantage of it. Secondly, not everything is in order in the enterprise management system. Such activity in search of “internal enemies” no longer speaks of the social, but of the antisocial policy of the enterprise: not to educate, but to break, not to develop partnership with staff, but to destroy it, in short, where possible - “to kill”, “ bend over the knee”, “put in place”. One can only guess what result they want to achieve at Severstal, other than “trench warfare” with workers. If a total “tightening of the screws” is in progress, doesn’t it mean that today there has been a period of irreconcilable alienation between the interests of the enterprise’s employees and its administration, starting from production managers and above. The first do not believe the second, the second do not believe the first, and now they will never get together, never merge in a passionate love kiss. But the topic of this essay is even somewhat different. The main question: “Why exactly the polygraph, the use of which in many countries has long been discredited, is not taken into account not only when selecting personnel, but even as evidence in court, and, in addition, does not have any serious theoretical justification in psychological science , in psychophysiology and physiology? So business? First of all, as psychological intuition tells me, this is exactly the case, i.e. business and fashion. On the one hand, by all means a myth is created around the polygraph about its supposed infallibility. The lie detector is objective, incorruptible, indifferent, and never makes mistakes. Since the majority of the population somehow managed to pass it by in their Soviet and Russian life, that is, there is no experience of polygraph testing while it is in effect. On the other hand, we have managers of Severstal and others like them, who are greedy for everything new and, above all, for what gives them the opportunity to psychologically dominate their subordinates. I’m not afraid to suggest that one of the psychopathology points of the middle manager at Severstal is the desire to be a manipulator, i.e. to have at one’s disposal as many resources and levers of influence as possible, including rather ephemeral and symbolic ones. If you can “test” your subordinates with a lie detector and, based on the results obtained, draw conclusions about his future stay at the enterprise, then you are probably at least a demigod, no less? But in general, what we end up with is what we once wrote – corporate deformation of personality. If you don’t kill someone on a polygraph today, then tomorrow they’ll kill you on that polygraph. A total “war of all against all,” starting from the very top. Let us remember how A.A. himself used to say in a moment of spiritual revelation. Mordashov: “If we don’t gobble up someone on the world market, then...” This is one of the leading ideologies of the corporate culture of this enterprise, only at the lower levels it manifests itself in its own way. You don’t need to be a “hundred-pound psychologist” to see in the use of a polygraph an electronic-mechanical parody of the psychological and even semantic interpretation of human physiological reactions. In most cases, this tool is used as a supposedly objective measurement tool in not entirely good?