Gender Differences, Smiling, and Economic Negotiation Outcomes

Research documents gender differences in nonverbal behavior and negotiation outcomes. Women tend to smile more often than men and men generally perform better in economic negotiation contexts. Among nonverbal behaviors, smiling can serve various social functions, from rewarding or appeasing others to conveying dominance, and could therefore be extremely useful in economic negotiations. However, smiling has hardly been studied in negotiation contexts. Here we examine links between smiling, gender, and negotiation outcomes. We analyze a corpus of video recordings of participant dyads during mock salary negotiations and test whether women smile more than men and if the amount of smiling can predict economic negotiation outcomes. Consistent with existing literature, women smiled more than men. There was no significant relationship between smiling and negotiation outcomes and gender did not predict negotiation performance. Exploratory analyses showed that expected negotiation outcomes, strongly correlated with actual outcomes, tended to be higher for men than for women. Implications for the gender pay gap and future research are discussed.