Additionally, knowing something about intercultural communication helps us to engage in creative multicultural problem solving strategies. Accepting and considering alternative viewpoints helps us move mindfully away from traditional binary (either/or) thinking and expand our diversity of options in managing intercultural team problems. In fact, a significant amount of creativity research demonstrates that we learn more from those who are different from us than we learn from those who are similar. Research on small groups indicates that better decisions are reached through more diverse decision making teams.
Further, technology is speeding up our identities as global citizens. We can now easily connect with individuals from around the world within a few seconds, and at a very low cost.
The fifth reason that developing quality intercultural communication skills matters is facilitating better multicultural health care communications. Borders continue to merge and divide, and increasingly immigrants and multicultural citizens require health care in their host countries. Many of these people have high expectations that their health care practitioners will respect their personal beliefs and health care practices; however, this is not always the case. Different beliefs and traditions surround the concept of death as well, which can make an already difficult time more challenging.
Global peacemaking is another reason to know something about intercultural communication. Citizens of many nations are rising up to demand better lives for themselves and their families by way of citizenship rights, democracy, and freedom. The terrorist attack on U.S. soil in 2001 prompted many individuals to recognize the important role of competent intercultural communication. Peace studies are forging new ground in university curricula, offering major and minor degrees on many campuses.
Finally, improved intercultural communication skills can help deepen self-awareness and other-awareness. For the most part, our cultural beliefs, values, and communication norms are acquired unconsciously. Without a basis for comparison, we may never question the way we have been conditioned and socialized. This can encourage the development of ethnocentrism, which means seeing our own culture as the center of the universe and seeing other cultures as insignificant or perhaps inferior. Groups, organizations, communities, and societies develop differences from each other. "Without interaction with outsiders, differences become difficult to understand and difficult not to judge. What is comfortable becomes right. What we do not understand becomes less than right to us." When we lack quality comparative cross-cultural knowledge, we may tend to view the world through only one lens. However, that lens can be expanded to understand possible value differences and similarities between your own and other cultures through intercultural communication awareness. Our awareness of who we are can deepen through intercultural knowledge.