Adolescents' codevelopment of critical consciousness and social dominance in ethnic studies courses

Adolescence marks an important period for developing ideological orientations toward intergroup inequality, and for racially marginalized youth, this can have implications for how they perceive their own social standing. Accordingly, we aimed to assess how two prominent intergroup belief systems, critical consciousness (i.e., critical analysis of and motivation to challenge social inequality) and social dominance orientation (SDO; i.e., preference for intergroup hierarchy), associate with one another over time among racially marginalized adolescents. Additionally, we examine how enrollment in ethnic studies courses, designed to promote critical consciousness, influences the developmental trajectories of these two intergroup ideologies compared to unenrolled students.

We surveyed ninth-grade students of color three times over the academic year on their endorsement of critical consciousness and SDO. A total of 459 students completed the survey at Wave 1 (M_age = 13.9 years, 52% identified as girls, 64% identified as Latinx).

Analyses from random-intercept cross-lagged panel models revealed that critical consciousness negatively predicted later levels of SDO among students enrolled in ethnic studies, whereas SDO tended to negatively predict later levels of critical consciousness among nonenrolled students.

These findings highlight malleability in adolescents' ideological reasoning about intergroup inequality, specifically that the development of critical consciousness may temper SDO in consciousness-raising environments; however, in the absence of these environments, endorsement of SDO may undermine the development of critical consciousness. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).