Illustration of the effects of sample incompleteness on plateau formation in statistical distributions. A primary factor in the appearance of finite-sample plateaus near the modes of PDFs is the area to the left of the PDF mode. The smaller this area, the fewer opportunities there are to construct the short tail of the PDFs in finite sampling, thus leading to the appearance of plateaus in the PDFs near their modes. The top plots depict the histograms of the log-transformed random variables drawn from select statistical distributions with positive support. The bottom plots depict the corresponding histograms of the original random variables but on logarithmic axes.