Wayne Weiten is a graduate of Bradley University and received his Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Illinois, Chicago in 1981. He has taught at the College of DuPage and Santa Clara University, and currently teaches at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He has received distinguished teaching awards from Division Two of the American Psychological Association (APA) and from the College of DuPage. He is a Fellow of Divisions 1, 2, and 8 of the American Psychological Association and a Fellow of the Midwestern Psychological Association. In 1991, he helped chair the APA National Conference on Enhancing the Quality of Undergraduate Education in Psychology. He is a former President of the Society for the Teaching of Psychology and the Rocky Mountain Psychological Association.

In 2006, one of the five national teaching awards given annually by the Society for the Teaching of Psychology was named in his honor. Weiten has conducted research on a wide range of topics, including educational measurement, jury decision-making, attribution theory, pressure as a form of stress, and the technology of textbooks. He is also the author of PSYCHOLOGY: THEMES & VARIATIONS (Cengage, 2017, 10th Edition). Weiten created an educational CD-ROM titled PSYKTREK: A MULTIMEDIA INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLOGY and co-authored a chapter on the Introductory Psychology course for THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF UNDERGRADUATE PSYCHOLOGY EDUCATION (Weiten & Houska, 2015).