Walter Truett Anderson (born February 27, 1933) is an American political scientist, social psychologist, and author of numerous non-fiction books and articles in newspapers and magazines.
In his public lectures, he frequently speculates that, if we had a history of every advanced species in the universe, we would find that they all had to pass through two large, difficult and unavoidable transitions: (1) accepting conscious responsibility for the future of all life on their planets, and (2) recognizing that their systems of symbolic communication—such as language and mathematics—don’t merely describe reality, but participate in creating it.
In other books on related subjects, The Future of the Self described changing ways that people are constructing personal identities in contemporary global society, and The Next Enlightenment points out the similarities between Western constructivist thought and Eastern spiritual traditions such as Buddhism.
Later, after military service and several years in magazine journalism, he began graduate studies part-time, completing a doctorate in political science and social psychology at the University of Southern California.
Daniel Griffith Anderson, a geneticist with the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT, the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Science and Technology, and the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research—and two granddaughters.