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.
Use the mean to describe the sample with a single value that represents the center of the data. Many statistical analyses use the mean as a standard measure of the center of the distribution of the data. The median and the mean both measure central tendency. But unusual values, called outliers, affect the median less than they affect the mean.