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LAWS, PRINCIPLES, AND NORM S OF COMMUNICATION AS CONSTRAINS
Laws communication are
 the most common non-rigid tendencies that are available in all types of communication;
 related to patterns of communication process , psychological features of the dialogue
participants , their social roles.
A principle of communication is a rule that has to be, or usually is to be followed, or can be
desirably followed, or is an inevitable consequence of laws.
A norm of communication is a set of rules that serves as the standards or patterns of
communicative behavior that are accepted or expected in certain contexts.

LAWS OF COMMUNICATION
(Y. Sternin)
1. Law of mirror reflection: communicators imitate each other’s / one another’s style. Such
imitation occurs automatically, unconsciously.
2. Law of modification of participant’s non-standard communicative behaviour: if one of the
communicators violate communicative norms, the other makes him/her change his/her
improper communicative behaviour. This law competes with the previous law. One of them
wins depending on participants’ communicative roles, their statuses, mental states, etc.
3. Law of dependence of effective communication on communicative efforts: effectiveness of
communication is directly proportional to participants’ communicative efforts. That is, to
achieve a communicative goal, it is necessary to use the entire arsenal of verbal and non-
verbal means, comply with the rules and conventions of communication.
4. Law of trust to understandable utterances: is an appeal to eternal and plain truths: the
simpler the speaker expresses his thoughts, the more trustworthy he/she is believed to be.
This also applies to the forms of delivery of these truths: they should be rather simple.
5. Law of progressive growth of listeners’ impatience: the longer the communicator speaks,
the more inattentive and impatient his/her listeners become. An effective speech should
not last longer than 10 minutes.
6. Law of decrease of the listeners’ intelligence with the increase of their number: the more
people listen to the speaker, the lower the average intelligence of the audience. This law
embodies “the crowd effect", which states that the logical reasoning of a person in the
crowd is worse, as the crowd makes the right hemisphere (which controls emotions) more
active. Therefore, the crowd intensifies emotional responses and diminishes intellectual
activity, reduces critical thinking.