Jason Hreha

I’m an applied behavioral scientist, author, and co-founder and CEO of Persona. I specialize in behavioral prediction and behavior change: understanding why people do what they do, and using that knowledge to help businesses make better decisions and build better products.

At Persona, we build software and assessments to help identify who is likely to succeed in a given job. We use that work to recruit, employ, and support remote team members for our clients. It’s a direct application of my work on predicting behavior and matching people to the right opportunities.

I’ve spent 17 years working in applied behavioral science, including as Global Head of Behavioral Science at Walmart.

I earned a B.A. in Human Biology from Stanford University, with a focus on neuroscience. There, I worked with BJ Fogg in the Persuasive Technology Lab, now the Behavior Design Lab. We co-authored Behavior Wizard (2010), a paper on matching different kinds of behavior change with the approaches best suited to them.

In 2019, I served as a senior advisor to Edelman for its behavioral science partnership with Harvard Business School researchers.

I wrote Real Change and co-authored Hacking Human Nature for Good with Dan Ariely and Kristen Berman. James Clear quotes my definition of habits in Atomic Habits: “Habits are, simply, reliable solutions to recurring problems in our environment.”

I publish The Behavioral Scientist and was a founding columnist at the magazine Behavioral Scientist. I also previously wrote columns for Inc. and Big Think.

In 2025, Scott Snyder and I wrote about why AI adoption depends on human behavior for Knowledge at Wharton. You can browse my selected essays and research.

I developed Behavioral Strategy around a lesson that has shaped my work: choosing the right behavior is often the most important part of behavior change. The approach starts with a goal, identifies the stakeholder actions that could achieve it, and focuses on selecting the best match before designing a solution. I explain this and the other ideas behind my work in more detail.