I agree that in any one case it doesn’t cost much—when you think of it—to actually ask the question. But the need to do that means that costs of really asking “how are you?” scale linearly with number of such interactions, and there’s a strong affordance for asking the question the generally-recognized-as-fake way. This means that parts of your brain that attend to verbal narratives are getting trained on a bunch of experiences where you ask people how they are and they tell you they’re fine (and vice versa). This plausibly leads to some systematic errors.
I agree that in any one case it doesn’t cost much—when you think of it—to actually ask the question. But the need to do that means that costs of really asking “how are you?” scale linearly with number of such interactions, and there’s a strong affordance for asking the question the generally-recognized-as-fake way. This means that parts of your brain that attend to verbal narratives are getting trained on a bunch of experiences where you ask people how they are and they tell you they’re fine (and vice versa). This plausibly leads to some systematic errors.