Click by Ori Brafman

Author:Ori Brafman [Brafman, Ori]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-0-307-71584-5
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2011-07-04T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

The Seductive Power of Similarity

Twenty-year-old Kelly Hildebrandt1 came home from work one day in February 2008, sat at her computer, and indulged in a guilty pleasure: conducting searches for her name on the Internet. She logged in to Facebook. “It was almost midnight,” she remembers. “I just wondered whether anyone else out there had my name.” She wanted to see whether her Facebook face would come up.

It didn’t. Instead of her own profile, the image that popped up was of a guy with short-cropped hair and a big welcoming smile who lived in Lubbock, Texas. Kelly Hildebrandt, meet Kelly Hildebrandt.

“He was cute,” she told us. So she sent him a message telling him that she had the same name and that she just wanted to say hi.

After sending the message, Kelly checked her Facebook account each day for the next few days. “I was curious to see if he would respond. Was he a jerk or a nice guy? Three or four days later he wrote back, and he was so nice.”

“I had actually done the same type of search a year and a half before that and didn’t come up with anybody,” remembers Kelly (the boy from Lubbock). “And then Kelly found me.”

Getting a message from Kelly Hildebrandt confused Lubbock Kelly for a moment, until he realized this Kelly Hildebrandt was a girl from another state. He was intrigued. “It didn’t hurt that she was cute,” he admits.

It turned out to be a match made in cyberheaven. Facebook messages turned into phone calls. Before long, twenty-year-old Kelly realized that she liked her alter ego as more than just a friend.

Kelly in Lubbock got mixed reactions from his friends for falling for a girl with the same name. Some people thought it was weird. Others found the coincidence intriguing.

Two months later, the Kellys decided to meet in person. Kelly in Lubbock made the trip from Texas to Florida, where his alter ego lived. They hit it off immediately.

So the Kellys began dating. “We both go to church,” explained Kelly (girl)—the two refer to themselves as “Kelly (boy)” and “Kelly (girl).” “We’re very family-oriented people, and we’re both pretty outdoorsy, active, and constantly doing stuff. We both like to cook. We both hate scary movies.”

The story had the kind of happy ending that made for a compelling news story (especially amid the dark days of the financial meltdown). NBC filmed a segment called “A Tale of Two Kellys.” The London Daily Telegraph ran a headline that read, “Kelly Hildebrandt to Marry Kelly Hildebrandt.”

Although the story of the two Kellys is a charming, stranger-than-fiction account, it also proves the power of the fourth click accelerator we’ve identified: the seductive power of similarity.

To better explain this, we’d like to introduce2 you to a professor by the name of Donn Byrne, who grew up in the days well before Facebook, the Internet, or even computers. Byrne’s father was a cotton broker, which meant the entire family moved frequently. Young Donn bounced from school to school growing up.

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