> Was it just to prove their hypothesis? Yes Removing outliers is common, but extremely sketchy. The existence of outliers in the dataset at all is most likel

> Was it just to prove their hypothesis? Yes Removing outliers is common, but extremely sketchy. The existence of outliers in the dataset at all is most likely because they are assuming a probability distribution that does not hold. If they are using the wrong distribution, none of their results mean anything.