I always wonder how easily scientists (and journalists) fall for the correlation vs. causality trap. It looks like that scientific community lost the critical t

I always wonder how easily scientists (and journalists) fall for the correlation vs. causality trap. It looks like that scientific community lost the critical thinking. I always think the other way around when I read a "scientific" study and ask (in this case): "Do people with higher life satisfaction earn more money?" (=the cause of the better earnings is the satisfaction, not the other way around). Without reading the study it's impossible to tell that the researchers ruled this out, but it is imaginable that this is the case, too. And it could be that there is a factor that is invisible to the study (maybe... IQ, height of the person, shoe size, ...?) that influences BOTH.