To explore the impact of the environment on perceptions of compliance gaining situations, 97 university students were asked to recall and describe situations in which they had had to persuade someone to do something. Their descriptions of compliance gaining situations were then evaluated for similarity by three additional groups of students. The data, submitted to multidimensional scaling analysis, suggested that subject perceptions of these situations were influenced by five dimensions: (1) resistance to persuasion, (2) values/rules, (3) gender relevance/gender irrelevance, (4) dominance, and (5) long-term/short-term effects. (MM)