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Allik and McCrae (2002) argue that “… decades of life experience appear to have
little systematic impact on basic personality traits” (p. 303). While this attitude seems to
suggest that personality traits are almost immutable, Infante and Wigley (1986) contend
that argumentativeness and verbal aggressiveness have a situational component.
Communicative behavior then is a product of both the personality trait and the situation
and as such fits in with Hummert’s Stereotype Activation Model. Studies in both
argumentativeness (Infante & Rancer, 1982) and in verbal aggression (Infante, Chandler,
Sabourin, Rudd & Shannon, 1990) have found support for the idea that there is an
interaction between trait and situational variables.
Aggressive communication and perception. A number of characteristics of the
receiver, including biological sex, group membership, type of verbally aggressive
message, message equivocality, and the quality of previous interactions, have been shown
to influence the activation of stereotypes available to the perceiver. Of particular interest
to this study is the impact of the receiver’s perception of aggressive communication and
the origin of the message. Prior research suggests that verbally aggressive messages are
perceived very differently depending upon whether they came from an ingroup member
or an outgroup member (Wiener, 1995; Williams & Giles, 1996). Wiener (1995) argues
that “…favorable actions by the in-group members are attributed to internal factors (e.g.,
their dispositions), whereas unfavorable conduct is ascribed to the situation. The reverse
pattern of descriptions characterizes the behavior of the outgroup—that is, negative
behaviors are attributed to the dispositions” (p. 213). This attribution of negative
behaviors of ingroup members to situational factors and the attribution of the negative
behaviors of outgroup members to personality predisposition has several communicative
Convention