Scientific Inquiry 1

Professors Philip Johns, Neil Clarke, Jan Gruber, Ajay Mathuru, and Bill Piel 

The jealousy exercise was one where students were questioned about their feelings of jealousy in certain hypothetical situations. We then compared the combined results of the entire SI1 class (the results). The first time we tried this exercise the results were very clean and very comparable to early published data: men tend to be more physically jealous, women tend to be more emotionally jealous. This finding spurred lengthy and impassioned discussion – about the biological basis of sex, and how natural selection acts on human behaviours – which was much more effective than if students had simply read the original results. The ultimate goal was to engage students with the material both intellectually and emotionally.