From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishulterior motive/purpose etculterior motive/purpose etcREASONa reason for doing something that you deliberately hide in order to get an advantage for yourself He’s just being nice. I don’t think he has any ulterior motives. → ulterior
Examples from the Corpus
ulterior motive/purpose etc• A member is entitled to a judgment that is free from any extraneous or ulterior motive.• Actually, he invited me out tonight, probably with an ulterior motive.• However, for Guangming Ribao, all her appeals to students to end the demonstrations had an ulterior motive.• It was difficult to accept that Jane had no ulterior motives.• The legislation pertaining to protection of wetlands and endangered species is clearly being abused by extremists pursuing ulterior motives.• They look around for other explanations and ulterior motives.• An ulterior motive for performing text recognition is to convert existing printed material into a computer format that permits further processing.• No ulterior motive lurks behind it, but it keeps you at a distance. 