Reference equality

Two references, one object on the heap.

Two references that refer to the same object on the heap are equal. Period. If you call the hashCode() method on both references, you’ll get the same result. If you don’t override the hashCode() method, the default behavior (remember, you inherited this from class Object) is that each object will get a unique number (most versions of Java assign a hashcode based on the object’s memory address on the heap, so no two objects will have the same hashcode).