Rob Alvarez Bucholska
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Why Most Habit Hacks Fail (and What Actually Works) with Jason Hreha | Episode 386

 

If you’re struggling to keep people engaged and loyal in your product or business, check out my FREE gamification course to learn how to do just that: professorgame.com/freecommunity-web

Forget hacks—behavioral change starts with better behavior selection. In this episode, Jason Hreha and Rob Alvarez explore how psychometrics can help align strategies with personalities for meaningful, lasting impact in business and life.

For close to 15 years, Jason has been applying behavioral science research and methodologies to solve hard problems in the technology world. He is the founder and CEO of Persona, The Talent Company. They are the world’s leading provider of elite non-technical talent. Jason is also a senior advisor at Edelman, a global communications firm, where he provides behavioral science insights and guidance to clients across various industries and sectors.

Jason’s passion is to create products and services that empower people to achieve their goals and improve their lives. He has co-founded and led several successful startups, such as Kite.io, a mobile search company that was acquired by Quixey, and Dopamine, the first tech-focused applied behavioral science firm. Jason has also served as the global head of behavioral science at Walmart, where he co-founded and built the Walmart Behavioral Science Team. Additionally, he is the creator of Behavioral Strategy, an interdisciplinary approach to ensuring that behavioral research is incorporated into new products and initiatives from the strategic planning phase. The goal of Behavioral Strategy is to achieve Behavior Market Fit.

Rob is a host and consultant at Professor Game as well as an expert, international speaker and advocate for the use of gamification and games-based solutions, especially in education and learning. He’s also a professor and workshop facilitator for the topics of the podcast and LEGO SERIOUS PLAY (LSP) for top higher education institutions that include EFMD, IE Business School and EBS among others in Europe, America and Asia.

 

Guest Links and Info

 

Links to episode mentions:

  • Proposed guest: BJ Fogg
  • Recommended book: Personality by Daniel Nettel
  • Favorite game: Final Fantasy VII
    • Earthbound (NES)
    • Overwatch

 

Lets’s do stuff together!

Looking forward to reading or hearing from you,

Rob

 

Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

Jason Hreha (00:00)
Hey, this-

Rob (00:01)
is Professor Game, where we interview successful practitioners of games, gamification and game thinking to help us multiply engagement and loyalty. I’m Rob Alvarez. I’m a consultant, I’m a coach, and I’m the founder here at Professor Game. And I’m also a professor of gamification and game inspired solutions at IE University, IE Business School, EFMD, EBS University, and other places around the world. And before we dive into the interview, you’re struggling.

with engagement in your business and are looking for to find out how to make your users stay with you. You will find a free community full of resources, quite useful. You can find it for free in the links below in the description. So Engagers, welcome back to another episode of the Professor Game Podcast. And we have Jason with us today. So Jason, we need to know, are you prepared to engage?

Jason Hreha (00:51)
ready to engage.

Rob (00:52)
Let’s do this. There we have Jason Freeha. Is that a good pronunciation?

Jason Hreha (00:56)
That works. That’s good, yeah.

Rob (00:59)
So

for 15, close to 15 years, he’s been applying behavioral science research and methodologies to solve harder problems in the technology world. And he’s the founder and CEO of Persona, the talent company. They are the world’s leading provider of elite non-technical talent. And he is also a senior advisor at Edelman, a global communications firm where he provides behavioral science insights and guidance to clients across various industries and sectors. You can read a lot more about Jason in the show notes.

But Jason, is there anything that you feel is particularly important that we haven’t mentioned on this intro?

Jason Hreha (01:34)
so, you know, I started my career off mostly doing product design work. So I would do product design work for technology companies, helping them figure out how do you apply behavioral science to make them more habit forming, more engaging and so on and so forth. but for the last seven or eight years, I’ve really focused on, a field called psychometrics, which is really just more quantitative mathematical psychology work where we try to put numbers on people’s predispositions, their mental qualities, et cetera, so that we can make predictions and understand them.

Rob (02:05)
Cool. In fact, I think one of those studies that you mentioned on LinkedIn is where I found out about your work and the way we got connected. think. The memory is not failing me. So cool. Jason, if we were to shadow you for a day or a week or whatever you want to go for, what would it feel like? What are the things you’re doing these days?

Jason Hreha (02:16)
Sounds good.

That’s a great question. so my general belief is that somebody should work with their personality, not against it. And so, I’ve done a lot of personality testing on myself. develop tests, but I also, you know, take a lot of tests. in particular, I am very into a test called the big five, the big five personality inventory. It’s the most research backed personality model that we have. it’s been developed over many decades. We have a lot of long-term data on following people.

who have taken the test just to see what are their life outcomes, how well can the test actually predict important life outcomes. so in general, my belief is if you understand yourself and you understand your personality and personality is stable in adulthood. And so these, your personality traits of a good test, like the big five will not change much that much over the course of your life. And so my whole belief is you should understand yourself and live with your natural inclinations, your natural predispositions.

And so I am not a routine oriented person. and my personality results clearly show that. And so I try to live a more fluid dynamic sort of life. So I like to have a fairly flexible schedule so that I can do more or less what’s calling to me each day. And, I work out almost every single day, but I don’t work out at a particular time. I work out more or less when I feel like it. And so that’s how I structured my life and my schedule.

And so if you were to follow me around on a quote unquote typical day, would be fairly atypical. My average day is atypical. And what I like to do is I have a list of different projects or different things that I’m working on for work and for my personal life. And I go through that list each day and I just look at, okay, what are my priorities in life? What do I want to do? What do I want to work on? And based upon how I’m doing that day, based upon my schedule that day, cause some days I have a lot of meetings, some days I have fewer meetings.

Some days I have dinner plans, some days I don’t. So just all depending on the nature of my schedule and what I’m feeling like doing, I’ll pick whatever I’m gonna focus on that day and go for it.

Rob (04:36)
Interesting. mean, I love that. You mentioned in that I could identify in many ways with a lot of that work. I’ve read, I’m sure you’re familiar with Nier AL and the whole time boxing strategy. Sounds brilliant. And I’ve kind of tried it a couple of times, but it just doesn’t like, it doesn’t end up fitting with my, the way I think or the way I behave, I guess.

Jason Hreha (05:00)
Interestingly, so I think that most self-help advice is really bad. And what I think is that, I think self-help advice in general falls into two major categories. You have people that have a certain personality and they think that everybody should have the same personality or should act just like them. So for example, let’s like somebody like Tim Ferriss, I think is a good example. He’s extremely structured, extremely organized and like a very type A diligent individual. And

If you look at all of his advice, it’s advice that would work great for somebody like him. And it’s advice that has worked well for him throughout his life. But he comes up with these general prescriptions that, you know, he thinks that everybody should follow and, you know, teaches them out into the world. And yes, if you are just like him, if you have a similar personality structure to him, that advice might work very well. But if you don’t, you should probably just find somebody else. Um, so I think that that’s kind of one bucket of self help advice. And the other bucket is.

You have people who like, like, let’s use me as an example. Let’s say I had a different model, a different understanding of human psychology and behavior. And I thought, man, you know, what’s holding me back in life is that I’m not, I’m not structured and organized enough. Let’s, let’s say I thought that was the case. you know, I work with my, my, my lack of extreme structure and organization and I make it work for me very well. But let’s say I thought, my God, this is my biggest shortcoming.

It’s why I’m not as successful as I want to be. If that was the case, I might come up with a bunch of advice around you need systems and you need to build in, you need to work, you need to live according to a very strict structure and you should wake up at eight o’clock each day and put everything in the calendar ahead of time and force yourself to live according to a pre-optimized schedule that you’ve come up for yourself. That would be like another type of self-help advice. So I think that people either come up based on their personalities, they say,

this is how everybody should live and here’s how you should do it and here’s how everybody should act. Or people come up with based upon a lack or feeling of need, they say, uh-oh, I have this huge shortcoming. Everybody, like this is the major thing holding me back and this is the big secret to succeeding in life. And so I think that people either come up with advice based upon who they are or what they lack and just push it out there. But the secret really, I think, is just understanding yourself in as much detail.

and as accurately as possible and living according to your strengths and weaknesses and living with the flow of who you are rather than trying to push against it. And so, you know, I, I know near from San Francisco and he’s an extremely, extremely organized, just very diligent person. so yes, his strategies work for somebody like him, who’s a huge outlier in that way. But I think that his advice, if I were, if I had to guess would work for very few other people.

I don’t think it’s good general purpose advice.

Rob (07:55)
Interesting. I was not going in that direction, but it took a very, very interesting spin of saying, you where do these things come from? Interesting. I never thought of it that way. I probably want to try look into that from other perspectives and other people doing in the self-help world and see where they fall in that categorization. I was going for one specific thing that you mentioned because you said, yeah, I do at the gym or do workout regularly.

but not at the same hour. So I was thinking like, for me, like the only way that has been working for me lately is I actually, like, I put in my schedule, I have that space for it. And there’s also a specific class that I go to. It’s sort of a CrossFit kind of thing. I’m not shit for CrossFit. So it’s a much lower level, but the classes happen at a certain time. So if I have the time there, I go and that kind of works for me. It’s always at the same time. But you said, no, I just, when I feel like it. And one of the things that,

not my case, have to say, but most people struggle with is the motivation to actually say, let me go to the gym. Yeah, I’m guessing that’s not the situation for you. You’re already motivated to go to the gym. It’s just about finding the right time.

Jason Hreha (09:08)
Yeah, I mean, so I’m not a big gym guy, actually. So I’m not a huge fan of gyms. I don’t enjoy them. I don’t really like that environment that much. And I think it’s a huge hassle to go to the gym. So I actually I released a book last year. It’s called Real Change. And in the book, I talk about my behavior change, my let’s call it self help or behavior change point of view. And it’s my belief that

The most important thing that you can do if you want to engage in a particular activity is to choose the right activity in the first place. And I think that almost nobody in the behavioral science world really talks about this or thinks about it, but it’s very obvious when you think about it. But for example, right now running is very popular. Everybody’s joining running clubs. They want to get into running because they think it’s like a good thing to do in order to get healthy. And yes, running is healthy.

It’s a great thing to do. It’s great to have a good cardiovascular fitness. That’s true. But running is not the most enjoyable activity in the world for most people. It’s just not that great. It’s painful. It’s hard on their knees. It’s requires a ton of willpower and just brutal grinding. And not everybody is in an area with great running trails, right? If you live in New York city or something like that, maybe if you live close to central park, it’s actually they’re pretty running paths to go down, but

If you live in like the lower East side or something like that, it’s just a chaotic urban environment where running might even be unsafe, right? It’s just not that enjoyable of an environment to run in. And so if somebody was living in the lower East side and they’re saying, Hey, you know, I want to start running. Like I need to exercise more. I should start running. That’s probably not the best behavior for them. It’s not going to be that enjoyable. It’s going to be kind of stressful if they don’t have.

Maybe they have pre-existing injuries where it’s like kind of hard on their knees hips, etc Like I don’t know their their health status, right?

Rob (11:06)
Ernie I like me which I did enjoy running I have to say

Jason Hreha (11:09)
Sure. So my whole point of view is, okay, why do we do any behavior? The only reason people engage in behaviors in general is to achieve some sort of goal, some sort of outcome that they desire. So people are not running just for running sake. They’re running because they want to get, once again, good cardiovascular fitness. Maybe they want to lose some weight. Maybe they want to meet people and that’s why they’re running because they want to join a running club. So those are like three separate goals that a person’s trying to achieve with running.

in this hypothetical situation. And so is running the only way to achieve those things? Of course not, right? If you want to lose weight, you can go on diet. You can take Ozempic or one of the GLP-1 agonists, right? You can weight lift, you can do rowing, you can do high rocks, you can do swimming, right? There’s just so many different ways of achieving each of these outcomes. And my guess is that for the person living in the Lower East Side, this hypothetical person,

Running is probably not the optimal behavior for them to choose to achieve all the goals that they have in mind. And so I think that the most important thing that a person can do if they’re looking to change their behavior and achieve certain life outcomes is to take a step back and really think about what should I be doing in the first place? I think that different behaviors, just because of fads or social norms, or for whatever reason, there are just certain behaviors in the air at any given time. Like right now, cold pledging.

cold plunging, for example, is all the rage. Like it’s just a behavior that’s popular. It’s in the air. People are just saying, I should do do that. Or meditation was, you know, very popular for many, many years. I don’t think it’s quite as popular anymore, but for a long time meditation, everybody thought they should meditate, right? And so they’re at any given time, there are just certain key wellness or health or other types of behaviors that everybody thinks they should do. And they just go on to them. And then they try to use these habit hacks.

or tips and tricks in order to get to force themselves to do those behaviors. in most, most behaviors are not good for most people or not a good fit for most people. And just based upon your living situation, based upon your personality, based upon your talents, your strengths, your weaknesses, your goals, you should tailor pick the right behaviors for you. And so what I would say is for me with working out, there’s

different things I really like doing. Like I do like lifting weights sometimes. In particular, I like doing lifts like squats, deadlifts, et cetera. I just think they’re really fun. And so I have, for example, in my garage here, I have a squat rack with all the weights that I need. So I can do these behaviors that I think are very fun and enjoyable. I don’t need to drive 10 minutes to the gym. I don’t need to wait for the squat rack. I don’t need to deal with all the chaos of that environment. And so what I have different exercise machines and different equipment in my house.

that I can use at any given time to do the behaviors that I like doing. And you know, I will get tired of these behaviors and I’ll just, you know, I’ll discontinue them for a period of time and do other stuff. So for example, right now, actually, I used to run track and cross country in high school and I really burned out on it and I didn’t like it for many years. I’m starting to run again and I really enjoy that. And so, you know, right now I enjoy running. In six months, I might not enjoy running anymore and that’s totally okay.

I can just pick up a different behavior that achieves the same goals. And so my entire point of view is you should pick the right behaviors for you and you shouldn’t get too obsessed or glommed on to any one behavior. Once again, behaviors are a means to an end. And if you get tired of running or burnt out on running, that’s fine. Your brain deep down, your body is telling you something. And if you’re doing it in order to get cardiovascular fitness and to lose weight, let’s say there’s

50, 100 other things you can do to achieve that same goal that don’t require you to go running. And so I believe that behaviors are just tools, tools that you can pick up and put down at any given time. And you should really think most carefully about selection.

Rob (15:15)
Exactly. What’s what’s best for you at the right time. Yeah, I completely agree. I think that kind of falls into the to the failure story that we were aiming for. But maybe there’s there’s one where there’s one time where you were actually trying to apply your principles or something that you read, where it didn’t go well. Is there a first attempt to learn or a fail story around these these methods that you can share, especially to get some of the lessons learned?

Jason Hreha (15:41)
I’ve had so many. so I’ve done a lot of writing about the replication crisis in the behavioral sciences. So the behavioral sciences are not in a good state. So I’m an applied behavioral scientist and I think it’s a great field. It’s very interesting, right? What’s more interesting than people, our brains, how we behave. It’s a fascinating topic. But when I first started my career, actually, so I graduated college in 2009 and I started doing this applied behavioral science work right away.

And what I noticed about a year and a half or two years in was that a lot of the, the, the findings, a lot of the studies that I was taking findings from and implementing in the real world, I just wasn’t getting the results that were promised in those papers. and I realized this pretty early on and I had almost a little, a bit, a bit of a mini crisis. Cause I thought, okay, there’s two, one of two things could be happening here or maybe both either. I’m incredibly incompetent and have no idea what I’m doing. And I’m just a very, a very stupid individual, which

That’s always possible, right? I mean, especially as a new college grad, you don’t know what you’re doing. You’re just gaining life experience. You’re just learning how to work in the real world. So was like, either I’m incredibly incompetent or there’s an issue with a lot of these. A lot of the research and a lot of the papers that I’m reading. then about a year later or so, about a year, year and a half later, there’s this thing called the reproducibility project that occurred. So there’s a guy, Brian Nosick, I’m going blank on the university he was associated with or that he’s still at. And he.

said, there’s a huge, there’s a crisis in the behavioral sciences around, around reproducibility. lot of the studies just don’t like seem to have been done very poorly. and, or there’s like statistical trickery with how the results have been analyzed in order to produce a positive result so that the paper could get published, even though, you know, there’s nothing actually there. And so they did this project where they took a hundred

studies from top journals and then they had different people reproduce those studies to see what’s the reproducibility rate. And I don’t have the study right in front of me right now, but if I remember correctly, the reproducibility rate, so they’re able to reproduce like 36 or so out of the 100 studies that they chose. And so you, let’s say roughly a third of the, could reproduce roughly a third of the studies. And so that shows you that based upon that project, two thirds of the studies that you would encounter

in a behavioral science journal, you you would expect to not be valid or to not have a reproducible result, right? Where there’s a, either there’s fraud or a false positive, something like that, right? And so,

very early on in my career, I just noticed this time and time again. And I’ve noticed it since. so, you know, it’s hard for me. So like I was the global head of behavioral sciences at Walmart for a period of time and ran a lot of studies there. And I can’t go into extreme depth about all the work I did there just because, you know, it’s confidential. But I will say that, for example, loss aversion framing, which is something that is talked about in like Robert Cialdini’s book, if you’ve ever read

book, Influence, talks about using scarcity framing or loss aversion framing. And this is also a popular thing from behavioral economics where losses loom larger than gains. If somebody has the chance to not lose $10 versus gain $10, the chance to not lose $10 will have a more robust behavioral impact on them. And for example, I ran some experiments there that showed this was not the case.

I didn’t get that result. And actually research has come out since then showing that actually loss aversion really only seems to become a real thing when you’re dealing with extremely large losses versus very large gains. So when you’re dealing with catastrophic or very large losses, loss aversion does seem to have a robust impact, but when you’re dealing with small amounts, it doesn’t seem to be a thing, but that goes contra to what a lot of behavioral economics research says, for example. And so this field,

is just filled with a lot of very bad research, a lot of false findings. so time and time again, throughout my entire career, I’ve run into this problem where I read about something or I learn about some effect and I try to use it to my advantage in a business situation, in an applied situation. And I just found there’s nothing here.

Rob (20:10)
Dang, that’s got a sting for sure. You you’re kind of basing what you’re doing on something that then eventually just doesn’t work out. Jason, now that you had this experience, you you’ve been doing this for quite a while, you’ve seen the issues that are out there. When you’re going to use behavioral science to solve some sort of problem, say anything from, you know, what is the right, you know, workout for me at the time?

all the way to something for your clients, whatever you want to go for. Do you have a structure? Do you have a system? you have like, do you research this stuff? Like how do you do it? How do you come up with a solution? Essentially.

Jason Hreha (20:51)
Yeah. you know, one of my core beliefs is that every, every behavioral problem requires a very specific behavioral solution. It’s very hard, you know, in, in this field, we’re obsessed with like one size fits all advice or like general purpose advice, but the most general piece of advice I can give is that general purpose advice tends to not work because we’re all very unique, right? you know, I’ve been focusing on

the psychometric and personality side of things the last, you know, let’s say, as I said before, like seven, eight, nine years, let’s say something along around those lines. It’s hard to pick a specific date when they started focusing on this stuff, but, you know, we all are extremely unique in our psychological structure, right? Some people are much more organized. Some people are much higher in the trait conscientiousness than other people. Certain people are highly, what’s called highly open to new experiences. They’re much more exploratory.

They’re much more into novel ideas. more adventurous with the types of things that they want to try. Other people are more traditional, less, less exploratory. Certain people are hyper competitive and self oriented. They want to be the best they want to win. Whereas other people are much more collaborative and much, much greater team players. Right? Some people are highly sensitive to, to threats in their environment. They’re a lot more anxious and more kind of hair trigger when it comes to that sort of stuff. Other people are more chill. Right? And so it’s very hard for me to.

If you just tell me, hey, you know, we want to change the behavior or we want to get, let’s say we want to get people to, I don’t know, take their anti-allergy medication more often. If you just say, how do get people to take anti-allergy medication more often? Well, there are some very high level, easy things I could tell you. could say, well, you know, make sure that they remember to take it, send them reminders, et cetera. That’s obvious, right? Like those sorts of things are obvious, but those sorts of things are going to have a

usually a pretty marginal, fairly minor impact on a behavior like that. In general, if people are not engaging in a behavior, it’s for, a lot of times it’s for a very good reason. And in order to understand why a person or a group of people isn’t engaging in a behavior, you really have to get very specific. You have to say, okay, who are the specific individuals? Where do they live? What’s their life situation? When they’ve, have they taken this in the past? If so, what happened to them? What was their result or what was the impact?

What are their life goals? What are they motivated by? What are their big concerns? Right. And you really have to do in depth, user or psychological research to understand what makes them tick and to really understand the root cause of them not engaging in that behavior. Because if somebody has bad allergies, you would think that it’d be reinforcing and rewarding for them to take the anti-allergy medication. So if they’re not taking it, there’s probably like a fairly good reason that’s fairly complex that we don’t necessarily, understand from afar. And so.

My behavior change approach really is very much, I always like to understand who am I trying to change, do as much research as I can into them. I try to understand them from a personality perspective, if I can, because I do think that personality is the dominant determinant of behavior. That’s my belief just based upon my life experience, based on my reading of the literature. I do think that personality is the biggest determinant of behaviors.

So, you know, I’ll go and try and understand them as best as possible, understand their environment, their situation, their goals, their motivators as much as possible. And then based upon all that information, come up with an intervention.

Rob (24:24)
you really deeply understand who they are before you can propose something to solve the problem.

Jason Hreha (24:29)
And, I’m actually writing an article about this right now, but my general belief is that, the top three major determinants of like our behaviors in life is number one, like our personality. so we all just kind of are, we all are kind of just given a certain set of different aptitudes.

preferences predispositions when it comes to just like the repertoire behaviors that we can do. We all just have our own unique set of behavioral predispositions, our own unique personalities. And our personality doesn’t just cause us to behave a certain way in our given environment, but it also causes us to choose the environments we go into in the first place, right? So we’re not static creatures that can’t move, that can’t

change, right? And so somebody who’s highly creative and really into new ideas, who’s highly intellectual, they’re not going to live in, most likely, they’re not going to live in the middle of nowhere in a small town. They’re going to want to be in San Francisco, London, New York City, something like that, right? And if they do live, or let’s say they did grow up in a small town in the middle of nowhere, they’re probably going to move as soon as they’re able to, right? And so our personalities push us to

seek out environments that are a good fit for us and that reinforce our certain behaviors and reinforce certain activities and actions. And so I think that I do think that personality is the biggest, sorry, my, my dog’s a, sorry I’ve been here.

Rob (26:11)
And he does because now I say hi to your dog on my behalf for sure. Especially nowadays that this is actually possible. Like you think, you you say 300 years back and that sounds like a lot of time, but you know, we’ve been around for so long. 300 years is relatively recent. So now we can actually do this. Like there was not that much mobility in the past.

Jason Hreha (26:33)
Totally, yeah, 100 % agree. So it’s like, you know, I think personality is top. After that, you have incentives and rewards. And so, right, if I came to you and, you know, for example, computer programming. Computer programming is not something that many people traditionally were all that into or excited by. Like it was a very niche thing. But now, right, you can make a few hundred thousand dollars a year working for a tech company.

If you do programming and if you look at enrollment in these programs at universities across the world, sky high, right? It’s like the most popular major by far at the school I went to, Stanford. Like when I was there, it was more like biology and things like that. There’s a major called human biology that was very popular because people wanted to go into healthcare, medicine, et cetera. But today, right, the incentives changed.

And suddenly you can make a lot of money doing this particular behavior, this particular set of activities. And then suddenly, you know, people dramatically shift their, their, their behaviors to fall in line with that. so I think incentives rewards is like the next biggest driver of behavior. And then after that, I would say. Like social pressure, social norms, though those two to be, to be candid, like those two overlap a bit, right? Because there are a lot of.

Rob (27:59)
It depends on the personality to get back to the previous…

Jason Hreha (28:01)
It

does. Those two overlap a little bit, but that would be my rank ordering in general, just to simplify things would be like, think it’s secure personality, the incentives or rewards in your life slash your environment. And then it’d be like the, social milieu that you’re in and the social norms and the social pressure. And so I do think that if you’re, if you’re thinking about changing your behavior or somebody else’s behavior, I think if you broadly use that, this kind of like hierarchy, can really help you think about these things. So.

just thinking along the lines of, great. Well, okay, who is this person or who is this group of people? what are they like? What are they like? What is their personality like? What do they just naturally do? What are their natural inclinations from just like from a behavioral and emotional point of view and just understanding that really well and thinking about how to work with that rather than against it.

Number two would be how do we change the incentive structure or the reward system in place? And you know, you’re really into video games, like video games are reward systems, right? They’re very powerful and very effective at kind of modifying behavior or getting people to act in a certain way. And then number three would just be the social norms of the social environment. So a lot of like the most well-known or popular behavior change case studies are like examples of using like social norms, social pressure, in order to

get people to act one way versus another, right? Like for example, public health campaigns are all about trying to create a new social norm, right? Like smoking’s gross, right? Smoking’s disgusting. It’s not good. Like, you know, social shaming, right? Okay, we don’t smoke anymore. People should not smoke. This is a no smoking environment. So that if you then do that, if you break the rules, if you act out against that, you’re seen as strange or weird or just, you know,

like just not as good of a person or whatever. And so then you can limit that behavior.

Rob (30:01)
Makes sense. Thanks for that, Jason. And after, you know, we’ve had a few questions already, we’ve been chatting for a bit. Is there somebody that you would be curious to hear answering these kinds of questions in the future? Sort of a featured guest on Professor…

Jason Hreha (30:13)
well, I think, I really do think that in the applied behavioral science is my field. I do think the most influential person, the most important person in my specific area would be BJ fog. don’t know if you have had him. so I worked in his lab at Stanford and, he created this thing, the fog behavioral model, which I do think is the best behavior model that exists. And,

I just think he’s, he was just such a pioneer in this whole field and he’s just done so much for it. I really think that he’s one of the most important people that should be talked to and these things should be discussed with.

Rob (30:54)
Absolutely so much to learn from from BJ fog I completely agree and Jason next of course to your your book or books actually is there is there any book that you recommend the Engagers to read.

Jason Hreha (31:09)
Yeah, I mean, there’s so many. Is there a particular topic that you’re most interested in or that they would be most interested in?

Rob (31:16)
In general, the audience is using strategies that we learned from games, as you were saying before, from games and game design and playfulness to change behaviors, essentially, or to motivate people into doing certain behaviors. So I think that would be sort of the general field, of course. Specifically, sometimes we talk about gamification, but it doesn’t have to be exactly about that.

Jason Hreha (31:39)
So there’s a book called Personality. It’s a great introduction to personality science that was written by his name is Daniel Nettle. And I think, and he uses the big five as the framework, the one that I mentioned earlier that he discusses in the book. And I think that this is probably the best easy to read, good introduction to this whole field. And once again, I do think personality science is…

I think it’s kind of the crown jewel of the behavioral sciences. If you just really want to understand human behavior, why do we do what we do? think personality is, as I’ve said multiple times throughout this conversation, is the main determinant of behavior. And so I would recommend that book. I think it’s just like a terrific read. I’m trying to think if there’s another book that I could recommend as well.

Rob (32:29)
Sounds like it’s very well aligned with the conversation we’ve had.

Jason Hreha (32:33)
think

that book is just terrific. I would say that’s my number one recommendation.

Rob (32:37)
Amazing, Jason, we get to what typically is a very difficult question for many of us, which is, what would you say is your favorite game? I know you said you’re not as much of a gamer as you were. Maybe think back to those days, or maybe even nowadays, there’s something you’d like to play.

Jason Hreha (32:52)
Well, I loved like I think the most impactful game for me that I’ve ever played was Final Fantasy seven. I mean, that game is incredible, absolutely incredible. I really was a big fan of what is it called Earthbound, right? Is that Earthbound? one with Ness, you know, it’s like an RPG game. Sounds familiar.

Rob (33:12)
sure

if I played it.

Jason Hreha (33:14)
It’s been so long.

Rob (33:16)
I’m still getting wrong. I’m not sure if I played that one in particular

Jason Hreha (33:19)
Is it Earthbound? Yeah, Earthbound, yeah. That game was, I loved that game when I was younger. And then the game I played a few years ago, I haven’t played it for I think four years at this point, but I loved Overwatch.

I just think that’s one of greatest games ever. I I love those sorts of games. So, Overwatch, I was a huge fan of. Yeah.

Rob (33:46)
Sounds good, man. Sounds fantastic. So Jason, it’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast. I don’t know if there’s anything else you would like to say before we take off. Of course, let us know where we can find out more about you, your work, your book, the paper you mentioned. I don’t know, wherever you want to guide us as well.

Jason Hreha (34:04)
Yeah, I mean, I have a website, it’s thebehavioralscientist.com. I’ll just post articles on there intermittently. then on my LinkedIn profile, I’ll post different little posts about personality stuff, behavioral science stuff. So if you want to follow me there, that’s great. I did write a book. I tried to make it as short as possible. That just kind of gets to just straight to the point around, okay, you want to change your behavior. You want to actually achieve things in your life.

What should you do based on my reading of the behavioral sciences? And so that’s this book here. It’s called real change in the book. talk a lot about this process of behavioral selection that I mentioned before picking the right behaviors in the first place. Cause if you pick the right behavior, you don’t need to do a whole lot else. If you pick a behavior that’s well aligned with who you are, your life situation, et cetera, you’re going to do it and you’re going to enjoy it. And it’s going to be convenient for you. And you won’t need to use any habit hacks or gimmicks in order to get it to work.

Most of the habit hacks and gimmicks don’t really work anyway, just because you’re just trying to push a rock uphill. You pick the wrong behavior in the first place. Yes. If you do these little things, you know, the little habit hacks that people recommend, it’ll have maybe some incremental effect, but it’s not going to be that big. You’re not going to, it’s not going to help you go from not being able to form a habit to forming a habit. And so, I really think that most of the advice, unfortunately that’s given, in this whole world is just incorrect and just ill-informed.

And it’s very funny, I guess, you I do think that, you know, when we study habits in the academic world, a habit is like a very small behavior that can be more or less automated and done with little or no conscious awareness. And when people say they want to form a habit though, like for their New Year’s resolution, hey, I want to form a running habit. Running is never going to actually be technically a habit.

It’s never going to be a, you’re never going to be able to do that semi or unconsciously. You’re never going to be able to do it as an almost reflexive manner. It’s something that requires a lot of willpower and a lot of effort and is going to require consistent conscious engagement over time. There’s that’s not a habit in any sense of the word. so unfortunately, I think that a lot of the advice being given out there, it, we’re, we’re, taking science that’s meant for very tiny.

little almost insignificant behaviors and we’re trying to apply it to very big, hard, challenging behaviors. and so what I would just recommend to people is forget the habit hack stuff. Just try to learn as much as you can about yourself. Be honest with yourself and pick things that are a good fit for you. Don’t waste your time on all these little tweaks and hacks and,

that are recommended in this world.

Rob (36:52)
Sounds like very sound advice for sure. Jason, thank you once again for taking some time off your schedule to have a chat here with me and the Engagers. However, Jason and Engagers, as you know, at least for now and for today, it is time to say that it’s game over. Hey, Engagers, and thank you for listening to the Professor Game Podcast. And since you’re interested in this world of creating motivation, engagement, loyalty, using game-inspired solutions,

How about you join us on our free online community at Professor Game on school. You can find the link right below in the description, but the main thing is to click there, join us. It’s a platform called School is for Free and you will find plenty of resources there. We’ll be up to date with everything that we’re doing, any opportunities that we might have for you. And of course, before you go into your next mission, before you click continue, please remember to subscribe using your favorite podcast app.

and listen to next episode of Professor Game. See you there!

 

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