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.

This exploratory study investigates the extent to which social context influences the frequency of laughter. In a within-subjects design, dyads of strangers played two simple laughter-inducing games in a cooperative and competitive setting, ostensibly to earn money individually and as a team. We examined the frequency of laughs produced in both settings. The analysis revealed that, the effects of cooperative versus competitive framing interacted with the game. Specifically, when playing a general knowledge quiz, participants tended to laugh more in the cooperative than in the competitive setting. However, the opposite was true when participants were asked to find a specific number of poker chips under time pressure. During this task participants laughed more in a competitive than in the cooperative setting. Further analyses revealed that familiarity with the task affected the amount of laughter differently for each of the two tasks. Playing the second round of the poker chips task was associated with a significant decreases in laughter frequency compared to the first round. This effect was less marked for the general knowledge quiz, where increased familiarity with the task in the second round led to more laughs in the cooperative, but not competitive setting. Together, the results highlight the flexibility of laughter as an interaction signal and illustrate the challenges of studying laughter in naturalistic settings.