Abstract
Recent work in the area of communication and individual differences has produced measures of two traits which promise to be important to the process of selecting compliance gaining messages. In the study reported in this paper the effects of these two traits, argumentativeness and verbal aggressiveness, on compliance gaining message chokes were assessed, while controlling for the effects of two known predictors, negativism and dogmatism. The data indicate that the impact of these variables is situationally dependent. This finding is discussed in terms of recent hypotheses concerning the impact of trait by individual difference interactions on human communication behavior.