How human ecology education can counter learned social hierarchies

How we view the world and each other is often influenced by learned patterns ingrained in the social hierarchies we are forced to conform to from an early age at home and in school. In most societies, beliefs about appearance, gender, and color influence behavior and judgment in every aspect of our lives, with our shared humanity being secondary to visual and ascribed characteristics.

“[S]ocial hierarchy is the stratified ranking of group members along a valued dimension, with some members being superior or subordinate to others, and fewer members occupying the highest positions. … One’s relative status has profound effects on attention, memory, social interactions, health, and wellness. These effects can be particularly pernicious in children and adolescents,” states a 2015 article in the journal Social Neuroscience.

Our understanding of gender and race has been influenced by concepts mainly established by white men, which have been internalized in our belief systems, our appearance, social roles, and rank. These biased beliefs have consequences for equity, collaboration, and collective survival.

“Obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness about male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in the United States to maintain the myth of meritocracy, [and] the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all,” points out a paper titled “White Privilege and Male Privilege.”

How Social Hierarchies Become Internalized

The ranking of people within social structures is reflected through everyday cues long before they are formalized into law or policy; appearance, dress, grooming, posture, and social performance become the visible indicators that categorize people.

The desire to alter one’s appearance, beyond health and financial considerations, to avoid anticipated bias fuels several industries, including entertainment, fashion, cosmetics, and plastic surgery. “American women spend an average of 45 minutes grooming each day and make up 80 to 90 percent of the $115 billion industry for beauty products, affecting both their time and financial resources,” according to the Women and Public Policy Program of Harvard Kennedy School.

Stereotyping based on appearance is the low-hanging fruit of discrimination. According to a 2007 article published in the Asian American Law Journal, being physically attractive has several advantages in society, which extend beyond appearance. “In every aspect of our lives, we are reminded that appearance matters. Evidence suggests that society tends to attribute additional qualities of sociability, friendliness, and competence to those who are physically attractive. Appropriate standards of appearance are measured and dictated by societal norms, with white culture often serving as a reference. Those who do not measure up to society’s norms of aesthetics, appearance, and grooming are often perceived as lazy, incompetent, and less productive.”

Research on the attractiveness halo effect shows that people often infer positive traits, such as trustworthiness, from appearance. A 2023 study published in the journal PLOS One has also examined an “honesty premium” relating to judgments of attractive faces. According to the study, participants were provided with a personality description, which included manipulations of honesty, intelligence, and independence, along with personality ratings. Thereafter, “a face image of a target person was shown, and the participants rated its physical characteristics, including attractiveness. The results showed an ‘honesty premium’ effect, i.e., that target descriptions of high honesty increased the rated facial attractiveness compared to low honesty descriptions.”

This categorization of people fragments society into cultures, subcultures, and countercultures. Physical characteristics may be seen as signs of rank, intelligence, or value, making the process self-perpetuating by feeding into the human desire to belong. Discrimination then becomes embedded in individuals, governments, political parties, businesses, organizations, and schools.

The way a person looks and carries themselves can expose them to judgment before character or ability is even known or considered.

Dress, Grooming, and Social Signals

How we dress is the most visible and easiest cue to alter, which is why it so often becomes a social control mechanism. People are intimidated by dress codes and uniforms, whether the visual cue is a white coat worn by a doctor, combat fatigues, or a men’s suit; such attire is seen as a symbol of success. Each carries a long record of authority.

When I was attending a state college, I was asked to leave class for wearing pants; apparently, there was an unspoken sumptuary rule (a rule regulating consumption) regarding the dress code that applied only to women. Social ranking can also be reinforced through grooming norms, from pressure to alter natural hair textures to expectations that women adopt styles associated with youthfulness or submissiveness, turning appearance into another signal of social acceptance and status.

These rules aren’t limited to what a person wears; they have also dictated hair textures, leading to a cultural erasure of natural hair. “Hair and grooming policies that prohibit natural hairstyles—like afros, braids, bantu knots, and locs—have been used to justify the removal of Black children from classrooms and Black adults from their employment. With no nationwide legal protections against hair discrimination, Black people are often left to risk facing consequences at school or work for their natural hair or invest time and money to conform to Eurocentric professionalism and beauty standards,” explains the Legal Defense Fund.

How a woman is expected to dress is integral to shaping the image society expects them to conform to of being submissive and looking youthful. Pointing to how gender-based dress codes and patriarchy are intertwined, the nonprofit Breakthrough states, “Research suggests that historically dresses were designed to match social expectations of individuals according to their gender. These norms have crystallized into religious, cultural, and political ideologies across the world.”

Historically, whenever women have fought against these dress code expectations, it has led to progress and demands for gender equality in other areas of society. For instance, in the 1920s, when many women shed the corsets and restrictions of the Victorian era, women’s suffrage became a national cause, culminating in the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It prohibited the federal and state governments from denying any citizen the right to vote on the basis of gender. The fashion shift of the period also reflected broader changes in women’s mobility and public identity. Black and female leaders, mutually burdened by gender and appearance discrimination, continued to press for civil rights and equal access.

Schema theory helps explain how this happens—it shows how mental frameworks are organized by memory and prior knowledge, allowing people to link dress and surface cues to competence, trustworthiness, and status even when the link is unjustified. These perceptions can influence whom we trust, with whom we share our lives, and how we plan our futures.

Religious Support for Male Dominance

Many religions have supplied theological justifications for male authority. The men and women depicted in religious art and doctrines were defined by men in power in past centuries, perpetuating inherited biases. Exclusively male religious orders were among the early groups to gain wide access to writing and scriptural authority. The self-validating message of scriptures could then spread far and wide, along with the concept of male control seen as the gift of divine power.

Karl Marx said that religion is the “opium of the people,” mainly pointing out that, in a society divided into hierarchies, religion “functions as a mechanism that soothes suffering while simultaneously preventing the oppressed from confronting the real sources of that suffering,” according to the Sociology Institute.

There has been some shift in how we refer to God in the 21st century, with the Church of Sweden, the country’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, voting in 2017 to update its handbook to use more gender-neutral language for God. But religion is still largely dominated by the norms and values dictated by men, with women mostly missing from top religious leadership positions.

An Education in Complying With Social Norms

From childhood, we are subjected to standards of how we should dress, eat, and conduct ourselves, and are rewarded for conformity and bullied for non-normative features. Children are easily influenced, both at home and in school. They are exposed to implicit bias and social categorization before they can even name what is happening.

In high school, appearance often creates a “you are in or out” shorthand, using triggers such as the big-muscle ideal or the “dumb blonde” stereotype. Confirming this, The Hawk Eye newspaper, produced by students from Hebron High School, states, “Many teenagers tend to change their appearance so that they can please others.” Pointing out how the rampant use of social media by children has made a bad situation worse, the article adds, “Following trends may bring satisfaction to those who follow them, but there are still many teenagers who don’t follow the beauty standard. Teenagers who don’t conform to trends tend to get bullied by other people who see them as outcasts.”

The blind adherence to these appearance standards leads to some body types becoming the default preference in society. Medical schools and researchers have long used the male body, often implicitly white, as the default model of the human body. A systematic review of sex inequalities in medical research found that data collected from male participants are often generalized to females, producing real disadvantages for female patients, according to a study published in Women’s Health Reports. The Association of American Medical Colleges has also summarized how gaps in women’s health research continue to affect diagnosis and treatment.

Educational curricula also support gender ideology. From the early school years, children are encouraged to pursue a specific field of study based on widely accepted gender norms. Some examples of this include athletics and STEM courses. Both of these are often seen as “appropriate” fields for boys compared to girls. “Despite the recent increase in women in higher education, men and women are still concentrated in different educational programs and occupations. Such gender segregation results from persisting gender differences in educational choices, which lead to different educational opportunities and labor market prospects. Educational choices already differ in early adolescence, with boys being more likely to choose mathematics and science tracks and girls tending to choose non-science tracks,” states a 2016 article published in Educational Studies.

Maintaining equal education for all, grounded in the human need to learn and grow, is not possible when opportunities are denied through discrimination.

Even though these beliefs undermine stated commitments to equality, they run on autopilot. “The social environment in which boys and girls grow up (i.e., peers, parents, media, school) conveys cultural beliefs about what is ‘appropriate’ male or female behavior. Adolescents internalize these gender role expectations in their gender ideology,” adds the 2016 article.

The Costs of Learned Social Hierarchies

The social patterns described earlier exact a high price in health, opportunity, and income from individuals and nations. Companies may hire based on gender, race, age, or even the label on a jacket, thinking that a business comprising like-minded people will be more cohesive and efficient. On its face, that is an attractive proposition for executives working under cost and speed pressure. But the result can be exclusion dressed up as organizational fit.

The burden is especially damaging for women because of the beauty premium and the plainness penalty. This topic was researched by economists Daniel S. Hamermesh and Jeff E. Biddle in 1993, who found that such considerations add another layer of judgment for women, handicapping them in both employment and earnings. Once “dress for success” becomes the ideal, counteraction follows: jeans in the C-suite and pajamas as a sign of protest.

Differential Treatment Under the Law

Contemporary politics and legislation often turn human difference into a prey-and-predator game. Throughout U.S. history, legal structures such as voting restrictions, property laws, and the doctrine of coverture have created false hierarchies affecting women and people of color. Under this legal doctrine, a married woman’s legal identity and many of her economic rights were subsumed into those of her husband, shaping women’s property rights and civic status for generations.

During World War II, women “manned” factories, and it seemed like the United States was taking a major leap toward equality, albeit under duress. After the war, the country pushed women back into the kitchen as unpaid “happy housewives”. It promoted large families, clearing the way for men to reclaim economic power in the public sphere.

When I graduated from college in the early 1970s, I could not obtain a credit card or sign a mortgage in my own name because women were routinely denied those rights. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 began changing that. Yet the broader project of securing equal legal rights remains unfinished. As of 2026, the Equal Rights Amendment still has not been fully incorporated into the U.S. Constitution despite being introduced in Congress in 1923.

Meanwhile, just like any other profession, the rules of appearance apply to politics as well. Image consultants and media systems, driven by business cycles, create trends and favorites, and the public conforms in voting booths. Running for high office now often requires stylists, cosmetics, and visual discipline. As philosopher Crispin Sartwell states in his book Political Aesthetics, “Not all art is political, but all politics is aesthetic; at their heart political ideologies, systems, and constitutions are aesthetic systems, multimedia artistic environments.”

This takes away focus from the real people, stories, and human needs that should be the focus of a person’s candidacy and policy decisions. Eventually, this homogenized mold of visual discrimination becomes part of the national government and the economy. Even legal decisions in the highest courts can reflect socially constructed gender and color beliefs rather than a shared justice rooted in human worth. As Michele Goodwin, former Chancellor’s Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine, wrote, “judges may possess cognitive awareness of a past or present harm against a vulnerable group and yet refuse to intervene to avert the continuance of harm or discrimination.”

Hierarchy Beyond Politics

In the real world, socially constructed hierarchies become especially risky. Collaborative efforts to ensure climate adaptation and the sharing of resources to sustain life are often undermined when maintaining existing hierarchies within nations and across the world becomes the deciding factor in who is heard and helped, and who receives support and supplies already in short supply.

If these hierarchies are learned rather than natural, then they can also be unlearned. The question becomes about where people acquire their deepest assumptions about human value, competence, and social role. For most people, that process begins in childhood and continues through education. If schools help perpetuate social hierarchies, they can also help interrupt them. This possibility points toward a different educational framework: human ecology.

This piece has been edited for length. You can read it in full here.