Principles for Dialogue-Supportive Communication
Good conduct in communication situations requires jointly agreed and widely recognised ethical principles that help prevent violations of commonly accepted social norms, misunderstandings, and manipulative forms of interaction. In a democratic society, it is essential to foster a culture of dialogic communication. For this reason, we refer to the present guidelines as “principles for dialogue-supportive communication”. These principles serve as a practical application of dialogic communication ethics. The values and principles of dialogic communication ethics are drawn from theoretical and normative concepts of dialogism, communication and journalism ethics, and dialogic pedagogy.
For meaningful public discussion to take place, it is important to balance power relations between individuals engaged in communication and to ensure equal access to information for all.
Good dialogue also requires mutual respect and evidence-based argumentation. The balancing of power relations in communication is achieved by empowering people who are in weaker or more vulnerable positions. Greater power is held by those who have more access to information or decision-making authority, and this is realised both in interpersonal communication and through the structures and rules of communication within organisations and institutions. Other scholars have also identified universal values of communication ethics: truth, human dignity, and the protection of the innocent. In addition to theoretical approaches, we drew on focus-group interviews conducted within the DIACOMET project, which examined how people participating in different communication contexts perceive good, poor, or inappropriate communication. In addition, a systematic analysis of ethics codes and guidelines from a wide range of fields within public communication helped identify notable gaps in existing documents and provided important insights for their further development.
In developing the principles of dialogic communication ethics, we compared the theoretical approaches mentioned above and synthesised the key normative fields or discourses. We grouped these into six domains, each addressing distinct values and the principles of good communicative practice based on them. In formulating the principles, we also relied on the tradition of professional ethics, in which codes of ethics outline the principles of acceptable and unacceptable conduct within a given profession. It is important to recognise that the concrete behavioural guidelines found in professional codes rest on several underlying normative concepts. For example, journalistic codes of ethics are grounded in the concepts of freedom of expression, journalistic autonomy, professional roles, and the public interest, to name only a few.
Although ethical codes clearly define profession-specific behavioural norms (for instance, the presumption of innocence in journalism), they often remain vague when it comes to questions of communication ethics. As a result, it can be difficult to distinguish value conflicts arising from communication itself from those stemming from the specific nature of the profession. A distinctive feature of our framework is that it moves beyond the perspective of professional media actors alone. Instead, it demonstrates the relevance of dialogic communication ethics across diverse communicative contexts—from one-to-one and one-to-many interactions to machine-to-one and one-to-machine communication. In this way, the framework addresses not only individual communicators but also institutional actors and communication processes shaped by digital and machine-mediated environments.
Dialogic communication ethics helps to articulate behavioural norms that are recommended or discouraged from the perspective of ethical communication, and which apply regardless of professional context. We therefore propose that dialogic communication ethics—developed through the synthesis of various disciplinary approaches—can serve as a tool for raising awareness of communication norms and for reaching shared agreement about them. The domains are not listed in the order of importance. Rather than prescribing a fixed hierarchy, the prioritisation of domains and principles should be determined by the actors applying them, in accordance with the needs and conditions of their specific communicative context. While the adoption of these principles is strongly encouraged, communication itself is inherently dynamic and situational. The principles are therefore formulated in a way that allows them to guide ethical behaviour flexibly across a wide range of real-world contexts.
As noted, the domains are shaped by underlying normative discourses, and the six domains are
characterised by the following key concepts:
- Equality, freedom, and safety;
- Individual autonomy and informational self-determination;
- Quality of information and deliberation;
- Ethical conduct in situations of confrontation and disagreement;
- Active listening and inclusion;
- Constructive feedback.