Environmental factors are inherently much more difficult to study in social science than genetic factors are, because causality does not imply correlation due to robust violations of the faithfulness assumption. Basically, much of the environment that we are interested in studying are environmental interventions that can be applied to improve things, but people are already trying to improve things, which likely leads to all sorts of correlations between the application of the environmental interventions and the problems that exist, so as to cancel out the correlation induced by the causal effect. Intuitively, you can think of this as “going to the hospital correlates with dying, but much of this is because hospitals have the option of preventing death, not just because hospitals cause death” effect.
Environmental factors are inherently much more difficult to study in social science than genetic factors are, because causality does not imply correlation due to robust violations of the faithfulness assumption. Basically, much of the environment that we are interested in studying are environmental interventions that can be applied to improve things, but people are already trying to improve things, which likely leads to all sorts of correlations between the application of the environmental interventions and the problems that exist, so as to cancel out the correlation induced by the causal effect. Intuitively, you can think of this as “going to the hospital correlates with dying, but much of this is because hospitals have the option of preventing death, not just because hospitals cause death” effect.