Richard Perloff, Ph.D. Director of the School of Communication Music and Communication Building, Rm. 231 School of Communication Cleveland State University Cleveland, Ohio 44115 216.687.4631 r.perloff@csuohio.edu

Expertise
Persuasion Studies

Professional Experience & Community Activities

Richard M. Perloff is a nationally recognized scholar in science of persuasion. But during his 27 years at Cleveland State he has been indispensable to the School of Communication as well. He has been Communication Research Center director, Chair of the Department of Communication, and this year when the Department became a School, he became its first Director.

Dr. Perloff works in several communication areas including: persuasion, news media, and health communication. Persuasion has the "potential to help people's emotional lives," he says. "Persuasion allows us to study the role of communication in the continuing struggle of good and evil."

Perloff has written or co-edited five books, including The Dynamics of Persuasion: Communication and Attitudes in the 21st Century (3rd edition, 2008) and Political Communication: Politics, Press, and Public in America. He has also authored a book on applying communication theories to AIDS prevention, as well as work on minority health communication. Perloff is a national expert on the third-person effect, the perception that mass media exert stronger effects on others than the self, and has authored landmark chapters in persuasion and mass media handbooks on this and other topics. In 2003, he was named a Fellow of the Midwest Association of Public Opinion Research and was president of the organization in 1995. He recently was an author of book chapters on the third-person effect in the Handbook of public opinion and Media effects: Advances in theory and research (3rd edition).

He has published some 50 letters to the editor in newspapers, such as The New York Times, USA Today, and The Cleveland Plain Dealer. His op ed articles have appeared in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Plain Dealer. He regularly contributes feature articles to local newspapers, having recently published in The Cleveland Free Times (on children of radical activists, and a suburb's dispute with the Cleveland Clinic over property tax exemption), The Cleveland Jewish News (on a legendary local bagel store), and The Sun Press (on a family-owned barbershop). His recent articles include an in-depth feature on the life of a storied political activist (Cleveland Free Times, August, 2007) and cover story on conflict and reconciliation within the Cleveland Jewish community (Cleveland Jewish News, October, 2007).

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.

Read Dr. Perloff's latest Director's Letter.

back to Faculty page