The current study examined the impact of person–task incompatibility on the preoccupation with competence-related personal characteristics. German native speakers performed an English-language comprehension task. Quality of performance either indicated an important ability (high motivation to succeed) or had no diagnostic meaning (low motivation to succeed). In accordance with a theoretical notion by Wicklund (1986), the tendency to ascribe personal characteristics to experts for the language task described a curvilinear function of subjective task difficulty when success was important (i.e., more ascribed characteristics when the task was either underchallenging or overchallenging). No such relationship existed when success was unimportant. Results extend findings reported by Koller and Wicklund (1988).