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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[Relevant xkcd](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/confounding_variables.png).
When you don’t control for enough/the right variables, your data might lead you to a bunch of correlations without causation. If you control for too many variables, you risk shaping the data yourself or removing the source of a true effect.
The answer is therefore that there is no clear answer, and that in the case of social sciences some problems just can’t be conclusively answered with an observational study design like you describe.
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