figure A-10 Sampling error By repeatedly drawing and replacing samples of n = 2 people from the population in which N = 4 and μ = 7, you created a distribution of sample means whose mean was also 7. Notice that you drew samples with means as low as 4 and as high as 10. This suggests that when you randomly sample from the population, you won’t always get a sample whose mean perfectly represents the population mean. Researchers refer to these chance differences between samples and populations as sampling error.