The current state of the world requires changing cognition on several counts, and this necessarily involves efficient intercultural communication. It has often been thought that intercultural communication is problematical in itself due to linguistic and cultural diversity. The present article aims to show that this is not the case, but that what makes intercultural communication difficult are the universal rather than culture-specific features of humans, e.g. time preference (i.e. short-sighted decision-making) and group preference (a tendency to favor one’s own group over others).
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