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The Search for Optimal Distinctiveness
When I first met Adam Rifkin, I asked him to tell me about the most interesting
contacts in his network. “One of my favorite people,” he replied, “is Adam
Rifkin.”
He wasn’t talking about himself. Adam Rifkin has developed a strong
connection with
another man named Adam Rifkin
—a Hollywood writer,
director, producer, and actor who has been a major contributor to films such as
Detroit Rock City and He-Man. To avoid confusion, I’ll call him Hollywood
Adam, referring to his endearing doppelgänger as Panda Adam.
In 1992, when Hollywood Adam was just getting his start, Panda Adam
moved to Los Angeles to start his doctoral program at Caltech. People would
accidentally call Panda Adam when they were trying to reach Hollywood Adam.
Panda Adam wanted to get in touch with Hollywood Adam to clear up the
confusion, so he put his phone number on the Internet. For three years, no one
called. In 1996, Hollywood Adam was in New York, and a friend showed him
Panda Adam’s website. “I knew nothing about the Internet, and I was impressed
with what he’d created. I’d been mistaken for him a number of times, so I called
him right away.”
It was morning on the East Coast, and just after dawn on the West Coast. The
piercing sound of a ringing phone woke a sleeping Panda Adam.
Panda Adam (groggily): “Hello?”
Hollywood Adam: “Adam Rifkin, this is Adam Rifkin.”
Panda Adam: “I’ve been waiting my whole life for this call.”
On the surface, they didn’t have much in common. As far as they could tell,
they weren’t related. Panda grew up in New York; Hollywood grew up in
Chicago. Panda was a software engineer; Hollywood was in film. But when they
met face-to-face, they felt an instant bond. “Hollywood Adam is a fascinating
character,” says Panda Adam. “His career in Hollywood and mine in Silicon
Valley have had more parallels than I would have guessed. Any time somebody
asks me for a connection in Hollywood, he’s usually the person I start with.
Hollywood Adam has made countless introductions to help people I know. Many
people in Hollywood are narcissistic and self-centered, but Hollywood Adam is
as good-natured and kind as they come. We kind of have the same philosophy.”
“Panda Adam is a great guy,” says Hollywood Adam. “We have a similar
sense of humor. We help each other without keeping score. Neither one of us

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ever gives it any thought; we just do what’s helpful.” Panda Adam was the
person who introduced Hollywood Adam to Twitter. When Hollywood Adam
did a series for Showtime called Look, Panda Adam invited him up to northern
California to do screenings at YouTube and Twitter. Why did the two Adam
Rifkins identify so strongly with each other?
If you’re thinking it’s a name similarity effect, the data suggest that you’re
right—at least partially. Brett Pelham, a psychologist at the University at
Buffalo, noticed that we seem to prefer people, places, and things that
remind us
of ourselves
. Because we associate our names so strongly with our identities, we
might be attracted to major decisions that remind us of our names. In an effort to
demonstrate this, Pelham and his colleagues have conducted a mind-boggling,
controversial set of studies.
Across five different studies, they found that people are unusually likely to
end up living in places that resemble their first names. In one study, Pelham’s
team searched the forty biggest cities in the United States for the one hundred
most common first names that shared their first three letters with these cities.
Then, they matched up names in terms of how popular they were in different age
groups. It turns out that people named Jack are four times more likely than
people named Phillip to live in Jacksonville, even though the names are equally
common. (The Phils have apparently retreated to Philadelphia, where they
outnumber the Jacks.) And it’s not that they’re named after these places; people
are more likely to move to places that resemble their own names (Georgia is
twice as likely to move to Georgia as chance would predict).
It works for careers too: in 1990, Dennis was the fortieth most common male
first name in the United States. Jerry was the thirty-ninth, and Walter was forty-
first.
There were 270 dentists in the United States named Jerry.
There were 257 dentists in the United States named Walter.
How many dentists were named Dennis?
Statistically, there should have been somewhere between 257 and 270.
In reality, there were 482.
If your name was Dennis, you were almost twice as likely to become a
dentist as if you had the equally common name of Jerry or Walter. Other studies
show that people with the last name Lawyer are more likely to become lawyers
than doctors, at rates 44 percent higher than chance; the opposite is true for
people named Doctor, at 38 percent greater than chance rates. The attraction also
holds for products and people that we associate with ourselves. Pelham and

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colleagues have found that people prefer chocolates, crackers, and teas that
include the letters of their own names—and that they’re more
attracted to
potential dates
who have similar initials, even though they insist that this
similarity doesn’t influence their attraction. And evidence shows that similarity
can influence whom we decide to help. Researchers Jeff Galak, Deborah Small,
and Andrew Stephen studied more than 289,000 loans to more than 23,000
borrowers on
Kiva
, a microfinance website where people can give loans as small
as $25 to help people in the developing world escape poverty and start
businesses. People were more likely to give microloans to borrowers who shared
their first initials or their occupations.
*
It appears that similarity to the self adds a bit of grease to the attraction
process: people are just a bit more enthusiastic, friendly, and open-minded when
they meet someone who reminds them of themselves. This is what happened to
the two Adam Rifkins when they first met. They initially clicked based on a
superficial similarity, which opened the door for them to connect based on real
similarities—and start helping each other.
But the bond between the two Adam Rifkins goes beyond the fact that they
have the same name. To illustrate, imagine that you show up for a study along
with a college student. A researcher takes your
fingerprints
, under the guise of
studying whether they reveal anything about your personality. You both fill out a
personality questionnaire. As you’re getting ready to leave, the student pulls out
a paper from her backpack. “For an English class that I’m taking, I need to find
someone I don’t know to critique my essay. I wonder if you could read this
eight-page essay for me and give me one page of written feedback on whether
my arguments are persuasive and why? I need the written feedback by this time
tomorrow.” Would you help her?
You were just in the control group in a study led by the psychologist Jerry
Burger, where 48 percent of participants helped. But other participants were led
to believe that they had something in common with the student making the
request. After they filled out the questionnaire, the researcher examined a
fingerprint evaluation sheet and remarked, “This is interesting. You both have
Type E fingerprints.”
Now, would you be more likely to help?
It depends on how the similarity was framed. Half of the time, the researcher
mentioned that Type E fingerprints are common: about 80 percent of the
population has them. The other half of the time, the researcher mentioned that
Type E fingerprints are very rare: only about 2 percent of the population has

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them.
When the similarity was common, 55 percent of participants helped—hardly
more than the control group. But when the similarity was rare, 82 percent of