stanford prison fraud.

It was one of my favorite experiments: The Stanford Prison Experiment. Put people into a different context and they act differently. After only a few days, otherwise normal college students acted like prison guards and prisoners - even though none of it was real. It was illustrative of so much of life. 

And today I read that it was, for lack of a better word, a fraud. The results were manipulated as were the participants. 

What? Are you serious? 

And yet, there is something beautiful about it. Yeah, we know it's been in text books, yeah we know people have taught it, learned from it, used it, been transformed by it. But, we can admit it wasn't as real as we thought. 

Maybe the most important thing to learn from the Stanford Prison Experiment is that it's okay to admit things are false, manipulated, and not what we thought, even when we have a lot of people, time, and education invested in them. 

I guess it's still one of my favorite experiments - just for different reasons now.