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.
1 Such a distribution has a heavy tail, and it is easy to mistake extreme values as outliers. 2  The value may simply be the tail of a Gaussian distribution. 3  If you define alpha to be 5%, then you'll mistakenly identify an outlier in 5% of samples you test.