Funnily enough, the best avenue for research I’ve seen so far is about reducing online toxicity, since reducing toxicity is all about creating connections between people. In a poetic twist however, the vast majority of these articles push a decrease in anonymity as the best way to decrease toxicity. Things like “add webcams and eye contact, add profile pictures and user names” (well ok, the thing about pictures and usernames isn’t directly from a paper, but it’s an educated guess. I tried looking up papers but didn’t find anything solid.)
