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.
The mean and mode are highly sensitive to outliers. What this means is that the presence of an outlier will dramatically affect both of these measures of the center. One advantage of the median is that it is not influenced as much by an outlier. To see this, consider the data set 3, 4, 5, 5, 6.