In statistics, a central tendency is a central or typical value for a probability distribution. It may also be called a centre or location of the distribution. Colloquially, measures of central tendency are often called averages. The term central tendency dates from the late 1920s. The most common measures of central tendency are the arithmetic mean, the median, and the mode. A middle tendency can be calculated for either a finite set of values or for a theoretical distribution, such as the normal distribution. A measure of central tendency is a single value that attempts to describe a set of data by identifying the central position within that set of data. The mean (often called the average) is most likely the measure of central tendency that you are most familiar with, but there are others, such as the median and the mode.
Central tendency is very useful in psychology. It lets us know what is normal or 'average' for a set of data. It also condenses the data set down to one representative value, which is useful when you are working with large amounts of data.
The mean is the most frequently used measure of central tendency because it uses all values in the data set to give you an average. For data from skewed distributions, the median is better than the mean because extremely large values don't influence it.