Published Books
Richard Perloff has written five books integrating communication theory and real world applications.
He is best known for his scholarly persuasion text, The Dynamics of Persuasion: Communication and Attitudes in the 21st century (7th edition), which reviews classical persuasion theories, as well as persuasion applications to such diverse areas as cults, sexual abuse, health, and contemporary marketing. The book’s theme is that we cannot understand the message without understanding the mind, and both play a part in the time-honored, ethically fraught psychology of persuasion. Perloff views persuasion as liberating because we decide to change our own minds, but it can also be oppressive, as seen in the many ways nefarious persuaders abused their authority, recalling the Milgram experiments, to induce people to commit unconscionable acts.
The Dynamics of Political Communication: Media and Politics in a Digital Age (2nd edition), focuses on the entangled relationships between media and politics, democratic shortcomings in political communication, and classic concepts, like limited effects, agenda-setting, and framing, viewed through contemporary lenses. American politics, while teeming with problems, contains the seeds of rejuvenation, and the book suggests that democratically-enriched political communication can be a promising salve.
Perloff also wrote an earlier political communication text (Politics, Press, and Public in America, 1998); co-edited a 1985 volume with Sidney Kraus that examined the interface between politics and the cognitive information perspectives popular in the 1980s.
He also in 2001 authored a health-focused book that examined the role of persuasion played in the public health crisis of the late 20th century: HIV/AIDS.
Journal Articles and Book Chapters
Perloff has contributed widely to research on the third-person effect, the distorted belief that media exert stronger effects on others than themselves, and the hostile media effect, partisans’ perception that media content is biased against their side. His concern is not with the direct effects of media on people. Instead, the focus is on the power of perceptions: skewed perceptions of media effects; biased beliefs about issues that cut close to the heart; and ways people filter media content through one-sided interpretations, which themselves can indirectly trigger media effects. His research on these topics has appeared in Communication Research, International Journal of Public Opinion Research, and Mass Communication and Society.
Theory-focused publications, emphasizing the pivotal role theory plays in communication research, include a conceptual article on the state of mass communication scholarship in a digital age in Mass Communication and Society (2015); articulation of a model of social media and women’s body image in Sex Roles (2014); and a theory-driven assessment of a critique of mass communication research in Communication Theory (2013) that was awarded the annual University of Amsterdam School of Communication McQuail Award.
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