10.1177/0146167205274899 ARTICLEPERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETINvon Hippel et al. / MOTIVATED SOCIA COGNITION Individual Differences in Motivated Social Cognition: The Case of Self-Serving Information Processing

Three experiments examined the hypothesis that people show con-sistency in motivated social cognitive processing across self-serving domains. Consistent with this hypothesis, Experiment 1 revealed that people who rated a task at which they succeeded as more important than a task at which they failed also cheated on a series of math problems, but only when they could rationalize their cheating as unintentional. Experiment 2 replicated this finding and demonstrated that a self-report measure of self-deception did not predict this rationalized cheating. Experiment 3 replicated Experiments 1 and 2 and ruled out several alterna-tive explanations. These experiments suggest that people who show motivated processing in ego-protective domains also show motivated processing in extrinsic domains. These experiments also introduce a new measurement procedure for differentiating between intentional versus rationalized cheating