Expertise
Persuasion Studies

Professional Experience & Community Activities

Richard M. Perloff is Professor of Communication and has been on the faculty at Cleveland State University since 1979. A national expert on persuasion and perceptions of mass media effects, he teaches undergraduate courses in persuasion and political communication and the graduate seminar in persuasion. Perloff is the author of The Dynamics of Persuasion: Communication and Attitudes in the 21st century) (5th edition, 2014), as well as books on political communication (1998) and persuasion and AIDS prevention (2001), and book chapters on the third-person effect. He edited a special issue of the American Behavioral Scientist in 2006 on communication and racial disparities in health care. In 2003 he was named a Fellow of the Midwest Association for Public Opinion Research.

Perloff enjoys teaching classes at Cleveland State and talking with students about persuasion and politics. He served as chair of the department and director of the School of Communication from 2003 to 2011. He writes journalistic features for Cleveland weekly newspapers and has won several newspaper awards for articles on the 50th anniversary of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, and the life of Cleveland rabbis (Cleveland Jewish News), and the 40th anniversary of the Kent State shootings, and wheelchair basketball (Cleveland Scene).

Education

Perloff did a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Ohio State University in social psychology and mass communication after receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in mass communications. He obtained his Master's at the University of Pittsburgh in speech communication and Bachelor's at Michigan, where he majored in philosophy and served as an editorial director of The Michigan Daily.