If you're someone who rejoices at self-serve checkouts, automated banking, or online shopping—and I'll admit, I tick two out of three of these boxes—have you ever stopped to think about how taxing these shifts might be on the incidental social interactions we have with others?

Recently, while reading Why Brains Need Friends: The Neuroscience of Social Connection—And Why We All Need More, I realised just how much these incidental social opportunities are diminishing. Life gets busy, and we favour convenience and simplicity to make our hectic lives more manageable. But at what cost to our social habits? And what do we now need to do to strengthen them?

I could not think of a better person to ask than the author himself, Stanford neuroscientist Ben Rein. Below are the questions I have been wanting to ask since reading his book.

Kelly-Ann Allen: How much of our daily social interactions are shaped by our own cognitive biases and mindsets? I was struck by how often we misjudge our own social competence and the perceptions of others. Can you tell us more about the biases we carry into everyday social situations?

Ben Rein: Humans suffer from a rather unfortunate pairing of features: 1) an intense dependence on social connection for brain health, and 2) a tremendously high likelihood of psyching ourselves out of interacting. There’s a ton of research out there showing that people tend to let anxieties get in the way of connection: We fear that conversations will go poorly, we anticipate that we will be rejected at far higher rates than we actually are, we underestimate the value of connection, and we also judge ourselves as worse at interacting than we really are.

However, it turns out that these biases (and many more that prohibit connection) are often totally wrong. In a........

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