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.
This might be done if there were significant outliers in the data and a more robust measure of scale than the standard deviation was desired. Standard deviation plots are typically used in conjunction with mean plots. The mean plot would be used to check for shifts in location while the standard deviation plot would be used to check for shifts in scale. Sample Plot This sample standard deviation plot shows there is a shift in variation;