Membership of organisations may buffer fluctuations in mental health, but the organisations become vulnerable, as shown recently by Yorkshire Cricket Club and the Marylebone Cricket Club.
Organisations become vulnerable when members talk too much to each other and not enough to those in other organisations. Warning signs are generalisations about other people, for example: “We all know that…”, “People say that…”, and “It is a well-known fact that…”, jargon, and neologisms, for example, the ‘bazball’ of english cricket. The famous experiment by Libet (1983) captured the lack of imagination of a great many people, in spite of the sophomoric error of presuming that because a motor behaviour followed electrical activity, it was causally related to that electrical activity. Within organisations, modules can become information silos.

The instinct to teach may be to create in one’s own image, thereby to surround oneself with like-minded people.

The Crown Prosecution Service may bring an unusual case to court, not because it expects to win, but because it wants to be seen to be in vogue.

Humans cooperate because they remember their own fallibility.

Blushing signals that one wants to be with who one is with.

The decline in the marriage rate is consistent with realisation that the phenotype may change over time.

The discrepancy between social characterisations of human beings and the real human beings can be tiring and fraught, with outcomes like time off work to attend to one’s mental health, resignation and retirement.
The media foster social characterisations through selective airings.

Uncertainty about one’s personal contributions to corporate activity influences decisions about changes of jobs and changes of locations.

The number of people with whom one can comfortably maintain stable relationships is a function of human parasitic behaviour, because of the biological costs of hosting a human who is in parasitic mode.
A parasitic human who leaves his or her host, for example to comply with social principles has a reduced expectation of life thereafter.

It has been suggested that human choices about democratic or despotic leadership recapitulate similar choices in the birds of a feather that flock together.


Microorganisms stick together in a hostile environment.
Haplochromis burtoni is a small fish which inhabits Lake Tanganyika, and which changes its colour and behaviour patterns according to who it is with.
The chicks of the crested ibis, Nipponia nippon, take it in turns to be dominant or submissive.
Scrub-jays that had seen themselves observed as they cached food in a tray three hours earlier, recached the food away from the tray if they were no longer observed, but recached the food meticulously in the same tray if they were still observed.
For an adult human, survival in a hostile environment requires camouflage, mimicry and crypsis.


The underestimation of who we are with, including Mother Nature, is a continuing source of piquancy in english sporting activities. The offer of a managerial appointment to an aspirant whose only experience as a player and as a manager had been in a single culture, showed a failure to consider the possibility that he was who he had been with, compounded by an ultimatum of three days to accept the offer, which limited the aspirant’s time for family discussion and personal deliberation, and was a seriously misplaced application of a business tactic to a life decision. Predictably, the unseasoned appointee’s challenges have included the complexities of talented players from other cultures.
Undue competitiveness can cause one to strike a ball or a shuttlecock with the same latency, trajectory and force as one’s opponent, who often prevails.

The attribution of corporate success or failure to particular individuals reduces costs, because it enables emotional polarisation and disables precise analysis of environmental factors: organisations which operate in this way tend to attract operatives who lack attention to detail.

English cricket has been canalized by ‘bazball’, with consequent loss of plasticity. Premier league football is bedevilled by assumptions of linearity, by the throwaway word ‘quality’ instead of focus on calculus and trigonometry, by the failure to contrast the same event shown repeatedly, albeit from different perspectives, with multiple independent events, and by the failure to distinguish between a player who appears, illusorily, to have initiated multiple independent events, and a player who knows where another player is without looking.

Scientific experiments with humans are, amongst other things, relationships between people, the acknowledgement of which by researchers and peer reviewers will determine the degree to which the experimental results transfer from the laboratory to the real world. How were the subjects recruited? Were the subjects rewarded? What were the subjects told? What were the subjects not told? Were the subjects told anything that was not true? Were the subjects debriefed after the experiment? Were the subjects able to debrief the researchers after the experiment? In other words, did the researchers recognise the need to ensure that the subjects were not who they were with?