4. And, anyway, the internet has helped awkward people form friendships founded on special interests, but, on the other hand (so many hands!),

5. The internet may also have harmed human connections, because “many of the social cues humans have relied on for thousands of years are absent online.”

6. Nevertheless, awkwardness often goes gracefully hand in hand with giftedness and what Ellen Winner, a psychology professor at Boston College, dramatically calls “the rage to master” — a frequent concomitant of giftedness. And that’s why, according to Tashiro, awkwardness can be “awesome.”

Winner is probably primus inter pares of the scholars cited by Tashiro. As with much pop psychology, the 50 or so sections of “Awkward” agglomerate the findings of dozens of academic studies to support the book’s ideas. This is meant to infuse the aroma of scholarship and, more important these days, to datify the book’s claims in an effort to render human interactions as objective, measurable phenomena.

In fact, “Awkward” sort of succeeds that way once it stops re-establishing the obvious. Although nothing cited here approaches the social science drama of, say, the literally shocking Stanley Milgram experiment (in which participants were encouraged to zap their peers) or Philip Zimbardo’s famous “prison” study (during which ordinary people, arbitrarily labelled prisoners and guards, turned vicious), “Awkward” contains many useful and resonant observations about everyday interactions: the surprising social skills that often accompany bullying, for instance, or the unconscious scorecards we keep to numerically rank our positive and negative encounters with people we know.

And there is a further, more important virtue of “Awkward,” which becomes clear when it’s compared with another new and somewhat similarly social-scientific interpersonal-relations treatise, with another loose-limbed title that tries too hard to be casual: Alan Alda’s “If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?”

Alda — the actor, director, screenwriter, host of “Scientific American Frontiers” on PBS, author of two best-selling memoirs, founder of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University, etc. — here spells out his efforts to help scientists explain their work to laypeople through the methods used in improvisational theater and other techniques. These include consciously mirroring the expressions of people speaking to us (something most of us do unconsciously all the time), as well as storytelling, practicing empathy and so on.