The Leather Seats Fallacy

A common line of fallacious thinking is endemic to depolarization organizations

In April 1961, a group of 1,400 Cuban exiles, trained and armed by the CIA, invaded a small beach on the southern coast of Cuba. The invasion’s goal was to defeat the Cuban army and overthrow the communist government of Fidel Castro. After a poor showing from the expedition’s air support, the force landed at beaches along the Bay of Pigs and immediately came under heavy fire. Over the next 24 hours, the Cuban air force and roughly 20,000 Cuban troops bore down on the invaders, killing roughly 100 and forcing another 1,200 to surrender. The invasion was an unmitigated disaster.

How could such a risky plan have been greenlighted by the US government? The success of the plan relied on a belief that a popular uprising would be spawned in the wake of the invasion. The CIA assumed that anti-Castro sentiment ran much hotter than it actually did. At its core, the Bay of Pigs disaster was a failure to understand a target population, in this case, the Cuban people.

Similar misreadings of a select population occurred leading up to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the US defense of South Vietnam during the Vietnam War, and, most recently, the Russian invasion of Ukraine. All of these cases involved a fundamental misunderstanding of a target population and their willingness to support an invading force. In each case, the preferred view of the invader was projected onto the actual view of the target population.

Within the corporate world, this same misunderstanding of a target population has driven many marketing efforts, product launches, and ambitious mergers to failure. What do all of these failures have in common?

The leather seats fallacy.

The fallacy describes the propensity humans have for incorrectly projecting their own wants and desires onto a target population. The namesake case in point is the upper-class yuppie who is buying his first car and is appalled that he must take the time to opt-in to choosing leather seats.

“Doesn’t everyone want leather seats? Wouldn’t Toyota make a lot more money if all their seats had leather?”. The insufferable yuppie drones on, but the mistake is clear. He assumes the entire market has the same preferences that he does. In reality, different market segments with different price sensitivities have different demands, which drives the behavior of Toyota.

The key issue with this line of thinking is the yuppie’s second question – “Wouldn’t Toyota make a lot more money if all of their seats had leather?”. 

Because he has assumed his desires are shared by the broader population, he is now forced to believe there is something wrong with the market when the fact pattern on the ground doesn’t align with his assumption. In this case, since Toyota is offering both leather and cloth seats, Toyota must be incompetent.

Alternatively, the yuppie could avoid his cognitive dissonance by instead believing that Toyota is not just incompetent, but either corrupt or acting in bad faith. Even worse, the corruption could go all the way to the top, transcending Toyota and instead encompassing the entire auto industry, regulators, international organizations, etc. Sound familiar? This line of thinking is a key driver of many types of conspiratorial thinking.

Again, the reason these groups are assumed to be acting in bad faith is because of the initial assumption that the broader market has the same consumer preferences that the yuppie does, in this case, the preference for leather seats. When cognitive dissonance is created by the knowledge that leather seats are not the only option offered, the problem is solved by assuming either market inefficiency or foul play.

The idea is similar to the typical mind fallacy, which describes the general projection of the qualities of an individual’s mind onto the minds of others. The leather seats fallacy can be thought of as a specific form of the typical mind fallacy in that it draws specific attention to the projection of market preferences onto a broader market.

There are many lines of reasoning that fall victim to the leather seats fallacy, but for the purposes of this article, I think the most interesting relates to polarization, and specifically the depolarization movement. Plenty could be said about how this fallacy leads to conspiratorial thinking on the left and right, but depolarization-minded centrists can fall victim just as easily.

Almost every single centrist I speak to falls victim to the leather seats fallacy. The centrist talking points typically go something like this:

“If we could just get a commonsense moderate on the ballot, they’d win in a landslide!”

“The silent majority would turn out for a reasonable candidate who’s willing to reach across the aisle.”

Sound familiar?

This sentiment is exactly what’s driving the No Labels organization, who is in the midst of trying to nominate a centrist cross-partisan presidential ticket for 2024. The thinking is that a commonsense bipartisan ticket is what the nation really wants the most.

The leather seats fallacy tells us instead that a commonsense bipartisan ticket is just what the centrists running No Labels want and that they are projecting their own desires onto the rest of the population. As a centrist myself, I wish No Labels was right, but unfortunately, I think they’ve completely misjudged what the rest of the nation truly wants.

Many other depolarization organizations tend to also suffer from the leather seats fallacy. Andrew Yang’s Forward Party, for instance, is convinced that the vast majority of Americans want commonsense centrists in government. The success of populists in repeated elections has led the Forward Party’s leaders to conclude that there is something wrong with the system (similar to our conspiratorial yuppie). In their eyes, the two-party system and closed primaries are the key offenders.

The alternative explanation (that the electoral process is fairly efficient and is genuinely reflecting the increasingly polarized and populist desires of the country) is not considered by Forward Party leadership.

Once the leather seats fallacy takes hold and the projection of personal desires onto the broader population is assumed as law, it can become all too easy to find and chase symptomatic boogeymen rather than understanding the true demand-side causes of the issue at hand.

No Labels and the Forward Party are just two examples, but this type of thinking affects almost every organization within the depolarization movement. Centrists tend to take the “silent majority” talking points to heart, and when this silent majority doesn’t show up on election day, the centrists tend to assume there is a fault with the system.

This thinking leads to a weird form of centrist radicalism, whereby centrists, who typically are the vanguard of incrementalism, are instead advocating for radical changes to longstanding institutions like the electoral college or the two-party system.

“But the two-party system doesn’t reflect the will of the people”

Is that really true, or does the two-party system just not reflect the will of the person making that statement?

Of course, the far right and far left certainly suffer from this fallacy as well. Plenty of conspiracies about the Koch brothers and George Soros have been spawned by each side as a result of this fallacy, but the extent to which this fallacy is shared by the centrists of the depolarization movement is rarely discussed and can be surprising to those who believe centrism overlaps heavily with a rational approach to politics.

In fact, centrists are subject to the same biases as the rest of us, and in this case, the leather seats fallacy has pushed many centrist organizations to adopt radical positions rather than accept that their brand of centrism has lost favor amongst a majority of the electorate.

No Labels and the Forward Party are both hoping to invade the 2024 election cycle with a groundswell of centrist support, but if these centrists don’t pay attention to the actual demands of the electorate, they may end up with a Bay of Pigs fiasco of their own.