First, consider deliberate thinking. Deliberate thinking is relatively slow, rule-based and explicit; a contemplative process of weighing pros and cons, gathering scientific or statistical evidence. It would appear that this makes for pretty solid decision-making.
Jul 24, 2015. Outliers increase the standard deviation. Mean is most affected by outliers, since all values in a sample are given the same weight when calculating mean. A value that is far removed from the mean is going to likely skew your results and increase the standard deviation. Say you have five values: 2, 1, 2, 1.5, and 2.1.
A standard deviation much larger than the mean is certainly possible. It could be, for example, that your data are highly skewed. E.g. take. the simple dataset 42, 50, 55, 999. The outlier makes it very skewed. and the dataset has a mean of 287 but a st.dev of 475.