Have you ever found yourself unsettled by a strange noise at night? Or have you ever sensed a presence that wasn’t there? These moments of uncertainty mirror the types of questions researchers at the ALL Institute explore: how people navigate social systems and structures in daily life. Social systems refer to a network of individuals, groups or institutions that provide resources and services, such as healthcare, education, or legal systems. While social structures refer to the underlying norms, such as rules, routines and organisations we interact with every day. This blog post discusses how individuals are shaped by and sometimes resist these social systems that structure everyday life. The blog draws on interdisciplinary and participatory research to examine person-centred systems, particularly in this case, in contexts where existing narratives of stability, identity, and meaning are under threat. By exploring these dynamics, this blog post aims to contribute to broader conversations around how social structures are maintained, challenged, and framed in times of uncertainty.
I’ve never ruled out the possibility that ghosts might be real. Maybe that is because I have always been drawn to the spooky side of things, the unexplainable. Perhaps that’s why Halloween has always been my favourite time of year. It’s the one night when we invite the strange in. The night we’re allowed to play with fear. It’s about the silence that suddenly feels too loud, the unexplainable chill when you enter a room, the way shadows seem to flicker just beyond your sight. Like in The Sixth Sense, where the real terror wasn’t the ghosts themselves, but the unsettling feeling that everything you believed was true might be mistaken. That maybe what you thought was solid and certain…wasn’t.
Regardless of being a spooky enthusiast, I noticed something rather interesting. The individuals who don’t believe, the “non-believers”, still pause at strange sounds in the night and feel uneasy in empty rooms that feel too quiet. And I realised something. Whether we believe in them or not, the concept of ghosts disturbs our certainty. And this is where ontological security comes in, a concept I discovered during my first year of my PhD journey. This fascinating construct is a core part of my PhD. Ontological security was first mentioned in a book called “The Divided Self” by R.D. Laing. Despite Laing focusing on schizophrenia, it talks about how all humans develop a “false self” and a “true self” in order to adjust to social expectations. It explains why people can sometimes cling to social structures, and how this is not just about maintaining a physical security, but to further create a narrative for oneself in order to feel safe; the narratives on how the world works, and who we are. Ontological security works closely with identity, which allows individuals to feel a sense of stability, structure and purpose in their society. Ontological security is the psychological trust we place in the idea that things make sense. That there’s order. The “normal”. In a world where logic and facts are valued above all else, ghost stories threaten that sense of order and normality. They sneak past reason and logic and whisper: “What if the rules don’t hold? “What if everything you know, doesn’t actually exist?”
Humans need stories in order to make sense of the world. A ghost is a glitch in the story we’ve all agreed to follow. Ghosts unsettle people because they defy what we have been taught to trust. And these “rules” don’t just live inside our heads; they are built into the world we live in. Our society has built many social structures, from families, to schools and government, to the media we all consume. They give us a clear script for how reality is supposed to work. But why is this the case? Why do humans need these narratives and social constructions of reality in order to feel secure in the world? For example, when healthcare systems suddenly shift during a crisis, people’s routines and expectations are upended. At a Psychological level, humans are pattern-seeking creatures. Having social constructions in our society allows us to give meaning to our environment. Narratives and social construction provide us mental stability, they help us make sense of the world and believe that our identity has continuity. For example, the ALL Institutes ERC project, DANCING, highlights the importance of exploring and engaging with the arts activities and how this supports stability, identity and can provide a sense of belonging to individuals. The American Psychological Association (APA) ran this excellent podcast discussing how it is part of human nature to feel the desire to “belong”. Humans need to feel that sense of belonging, and security, in order to make sense of the chaos, and to order information logically. It provides people with a sense of self, and a framework to relate to others. It makes the everyday feel stable and familiar. Once the framework is disturbed, when the world feels unpredictable, and when the norms disappear and reality doesn’t behave the way it’s supposed to be, we feel it severely. This is what ghost stories feed on. They tug at the edges of what we believe is real, which then reveals to us just how thin the border is between order and chaos. Not only does it scare us, but it simply exposes the fragile security we have built around ourselves.
This fragile security is everywhere in our society. While ontological security can be explored through the uncanny and, as it has the symbolic power to trouble individuals’ sense of reality, what about the empirically grounded threats such as climate change?
As part of my PhD, I use ontological security as a support in investigating how individuals perceive climate change communication, and their responses. Climate change is another interesting example of when one’s ontological security is revealed. As the concept of climate change undermines people’s perception of the world as being predictable, stable and meaningful, this then forces a reaction from individuals such as fear, denial and can even cause them to develop learned helplessness. In this case, climate change behaves much like a ghost, not only haunting our future, but disturbing the very narratives we rely on to make sense of the present. Understanding ontological security can help us see that climate change is not just a political or environmental issue, it is an existential one. In order to improve climate change communication, we need to consider not just the facts and narratives that we present, but how they can shake people’s sense of self, belonging and purpose. What makes climate change so profoundly unsettling is that it reveals the fragility of the very world we took to be stable, undermining our sense of stability, much like how a haunting exposes cracks in the foundations of a house.
Being aware of how much we depend upon these structures doesn’t have to be a scary thing. Climate change is already challenging the stability we once took for granted, but instead of denying what unsettles us, we can choose to face it head-on. We can question the old rules of endless growth and exploitation and recognize that change is not only possible, but also necessary. By sitting with this discomfort and uncertainty, we open a new space for novel ideas and solutions to emerge. This blog is part of that space, by engaging with topical issues like climate change and ontological security in ways that reflect the broader goals of the ALL Institute: to challenge social exclusion, promote inclusive and interdisciplinary research, and support policy discussions to encourage more equitable systems. We can rebuild our world, without clinging to false securities, and only through collective action can we begin to put this ghost to rest.
Author: Jasmine Buckley, PhD Researcher at the Department of Psychology at Maynooth University
