Certain characteristics of a Taylor (1965) competitive reaction time task contribute to a lack of awareness of contingencies that exist between two aggressors. The opponent's contingent response to the subject's specific shock setting may be obscured by the reaction time competition, thus concealing the matching contingency. Nine separate steps must occur between a subject and an opponent in order to communicate a matching contingency when using the competitive reaction time task. This is also true in the study of human aggression vis-a-vis reaction time tasks using an adaptation of Hokanson, Willers, and Koropsak's (1968) interpersonal communication paradigm. Application to aggression of social learning theory suggests that persons who have a high expectation that their aggressive behavior will result in retaliation will be less aggressive than persons who do not expect retaliation. It was hypothesized that subjects who were likely to recognize the matching contingency more rapidly in the communication task would reduce their shock settings more rapidly during the communication task than during the reaction time task. Female college students (N=10) participated in a series of 25, 20-second trials and then completed a questionnaire to assess suspicion of their opponent and how they set their subsequent shock strategies. An analysis of variance for the last trial of the attack phase and the first three trials of the matching phase revealed the predicted interaction of task and trials, thereby supporting the hypothesis. (Author/HLM)