The Guardian's 'reading the riots' project raises a general question in the social sciences: to what extent can individuals' coherently explain their own actions?

The Guardian says:

Widespread anger and frustration at the way police engage with communities was a significant cause of the summer riots'The project collected more than 1.3m words of first-person accounts from rioters, giving an unprecedented insight into what drove people to participate in England's most serious bout of civil unrest in a generation. (Emphasis added)

But why should we believe rioters' own accounts of their actions?

One reason to think not is that people are so keen to maintain a positive self-image of themselves that they engage in self-serving biases, as Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson showed in their book, Mistakes Were Made. Three aspects of this are:

1. People paint themselves as victims. Tavris and Aronson say:

Self-justification works to minimize any bad feelings we might have as doers of harm, and to maximize any righteous feelings we might have as victims.

Which poses the question: are rioters' complaints about police harassment a genuine cause of the riots, or are they simply part of this self-justification?

Note that this point is not merely about rioters. Dick Fuld tried to downplay his role in the collapse of Lehmans by claiming to be the victim of market forces and Fed meanness. The victim narrative is a standard part of self-justification.

2. People don't accept personal responsibility, and distance themselves from their actions. Rather than say 'I was wrong' they say 'mistakes were made' - hence Tavris and Aronson's title; Liam Fox recently used just these words. This bias means that self-explanations of the riots will naturally under-rate the importance of simple criminal impluses.

3. People don't accept often accounts which tell them they are weak. This means that peer pressure - 'I did it because others did' - will be under-emphasized by self-serving accounts. And yet peer effects must be part of the explanation for the riots.

Now, you might think that, in saying this, I'm siding with those rightists who have criticized the report.

Maybe not. There is, of course, one figure above all others who warned us not to take individuals' conscious explanations of their behaviour at face value - Marx:

It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.

And, he added, the fact that we are systematically unaware of this generates ideology and false consciousness. But this in turn means that individual's subjectivity is constructed by forces they don't understand. Subjective accounts of one's behaviour will, then, be partial and misleading.

I say all this not to dismiss the Guardian's work out of hand, but rather merely to pose a question about the nature of explanation. That said, two thoughts arise. One is: could it be that what we are seeing here is a form of journalistic ideology? Journalists naturally think that you can find the 'truth' if you ask enough people. But this isn't self-evidently the case.

More unpleasantly, could it be that the belief that talking to rioters can explain the riots reflects a form of middle-class self-hatred - that the truth is to be found on the 'street'?