More generally, there's nothing worse than a social scientist who has illusions about being a scientist.

I was going to ask, somewhat facetiously, whether Asimov wrote "social science fiction" rather than science fiction.

Fortunately, I googled the phrase before embarrassing myself. Turns out he all-but-invented the phrase to describe his own work.

I suppose he had no such illusions.

Yeah.. There was that little Foundations trilogy that dealt specifically with psychohistorical studies.

Yes, that was why I thought of Asimov.

The thing I was unaware of was that Asimov did actually think of his writing as social science fiction.

There's nothing scientific in this case - quite the opposite: pure cargo cult. Hence my choice of the word: monkey puts candidate in, a number comes out, monkey checks if number exceeds another number. No science - not even thought - nothing, just blind obedience to whatever process the monkey was trained to follow.

That's my point -- the HR monkey was a social scientist, and the fact that they were administering a test and getting a number out gave them the illusion that they were actually doing something scientific.

An actual scientist would have asked questions -- Do the test results correlate with performance? Is the test biased? What is the margin of error on the test? etc. -- and would very likely have come to the conclusion that the test should not be trusted as a reliable indicator.