Negotiators are often advised to engage in small talk before getting down to business. Indeed, the benefits of chit-chat for rapport building have been well documented. In her research, for example, Professor Janice Nadler of Northwestern University found that pairs of strangers who engaged in a casual five-minute phone chat before participating in a negotiation simulation via e-mail were four times more likely to reach a beneficial agreement than were pairs who didn’t have a chance to chat. But in a new research study, conducted by researchers Alexandra A. Mislin of American University, Brooke A. Shaughnessy of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, and Tanja Hentschel and Claudia Peus of Technische Universität München, only men—and not women—received positive results from chit-chatting with their counterparts. In the study, presented at the August annual meeting of the Academy of Management, participants read a transcript and evaluated a negotiator named either JoAnna or Andrew who either did or did not engage in small talk—about local restaurants and a hometown sports team—before negotiating with a business counterpart for control of a scarce resource.