How do Scientists (particularly social scientists) know which variables to control for, and which not to?
Suppose I for some reason had the hypothesis that people with lower empathy made better businesspeople and I conducted some research and controlled for socio-economic background. If my hypothesis was correct but low empathy was also heritable and this meant lower empathy people were more likely to have higher socio-economic backgrounds then I might find no relationship. Isn’t this a problem, ie controlling for a variable meant I got the wrong result? What am I missing?
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It can but generally it can also be accounted for. Let’s take your example here “people with low empathy are better businesspeople.”
You could take a collection of random people, test them for business proficiency, test their empathy levels, and then sort them by socioeconomic background. If your hypothesis is true that a lack of empathy makes someone a better businessperson, then you should note that trend regardless of socioeconomic background.
And this may be important because you might find a compounding variable in these results. Perhaps people in low socioeconomic conditions are better businesspeople with high empathy, and the proposed trend only appears in high socioeconomic conditions. Or you might find evidence of the contrary, that being low empathy makes you better at business, being better at business makes you low empathy.
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