A study was conducted of experimental mortality (subjects' drop-out) in counter-attitudinal advocacy research, a line of research that explores the extent to which people can be induced to persuade themselves to a new attitude. Subjects were 54 volunteers from undergraduate speech classes. The study involved three stages: a pretest for attitude, instructions to the subjects that experimenters were preparing for a different experiment in which there would be an attempt to persuade subjects to a different point of view and that participants in the current experiment were being asked to encode a short persuasive message, and a posttest consisting of four questionnaires, one of which was the Burgoon Unwillingness to Communicate Scale. In stage two, subjects were told that they were not required to encode the message as it was not really part of their experiment, but that the experimenters were able to pay for the message. Results showed that neither the subjects' initial attitude toward the content of the message, the reward, nor the interaction of the two was a useful predictor of refusal to encode messages, but that the Burgoon scale was a useful predictor. (TJ)