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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Ideally you control by running multiple experiments each testing a different hypothesis. However funding is a limiting factor so often times you just do the best you can with what you have af hope someone else reads what you did and can fill in the gaps with their own research.
Ideally you control by running multiple experiments each testing a different hypothesis. However funding is a limiting factor so often times you just do the best you can with what you have af hope someone else reads what you did and can fill in the gaps with their own research.
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