Risk factors are factors associated with undesirable outcomes, like diseases or psychological disorders. Risk factors may or may not be causal. One way to tell is to tweak a risk factor and see if the outcome changes. If it does, there’s likely to be a causal link between factor and outcome*. However, some risk factors are only causal in the presence of other risk factors. In many cases, no single factor is necessary or sufficient to cause an outcome. Causality lies in how the factors interact. In other words, it’s all in the mix.

Take illegal behavior….

But doesn’t poverty cause crime? No, poverty is a risk factor for criminal behavior. But that’s too broad a formulation to truly understand the causal pathways from factor to outcome. For one thing, whose poverty are we talking about? That of the household or the neighborhood? That matters, because household and neighborhood effects aren’t the same. This is why the children of low-income families who move from poor to middle-class neighborhoods are less likely than the children of their former neighbors to be arrested or incarcerated later in life (Chyn, 2018; Manduca. and Sampson, 2019). One reason changing neighborhoods shows such a large effect is that it addresses several criminogenic risk factors in one fell swoop: social norms, quality of education, peer influence, role models, job market opportunities, etc.

Just because causes are complex doesn’t mean solutions have to be convoluted.

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* An alternative formulation: “The term "risk factor" [indicates] a factor that is associated with a given outcome. …exposure [to a modifiable factor] has a causal effect on an outcome if intervening on the value of the exposure leads to changes in the average value of the outcome.” - What is a Cause? (2019) Boston University School of Public Health

References:

Chyn, Eric. 2018. "Moved to Opportunity: The Long-Run Effects of Public Housing Demolition on Children." American Economic Review, 108 (10): 3028-56. DOI: 10.1257/aer.20161352 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20161352  

Gorsira, M., Huisman, W., Denkers, A. et al. Why Dutch officials take bribes: a toxic mix of factors. Crime Law Soc Change 75, 45–72 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-020-09919-w  

Manduca, R. and R. J. Sampson (2019). "Punishing and toxic neighborhood environments independently predict the intergenerational social mobility of black and white children." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116(16): 7772-7777. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1820464116