Current perspectives on motivated inference all tend to share the view that people's thinking and reasoning are influenced by their preferences for certain outcomes during judgment (e.g., reaching positive conclusions about themselves). In this paper I present a separate, but complementary perspective on motivated inference. This perspective proposes that, in addition to preferring certain outcomes during judgment, people also prefer to adopt certain strategies as a means for arriving at these outcomes. It further proposes that such strategic preferences can also influence people's thinking and reasoning independent of their outcome preferences . Five studies are presented that test these proposals. Studies 1a, 1b, and 2 demonstrate that people's preferences for eager (i.e., gain-focused) versus vigilant (i.e., loss-focused) judgment strategies can significantly alter the number of alternative interpretations they consider when categorizing others' behaviors. Studies 3 and 4 demonstrate that the same strategic preferences can also alter the number of alternative interpretations people consider for their own behavior when explaining their success or failure at an important goal. These latter studies further show that not only are strategic preference effects distinct from people's well-established preferences for self-serving outcomes in their performance explanations, but that strategic preferences can also, in some cases, moderate such outcome preferences. The implications of these results for the larger role of preferred judgment strategies in motivated reasoning are discussed.
