A colleague stopped by my office the other day and asked me a simple question: Why do we often see the mean of sample of data published in journal articles? I’m sure you are thinking, “why aren’t you talking about something more interesting with your work colleague, like your NCAA tournament bracket?” Well, the short answer is my bracket had already busted, so I’d gladly talk about anything else. Now, back to addressing the question at hand: my colleague’s reasoning was that the readers are most comfortable with seeing the mean, as they are most familiar with it from their statistics classes in high school.