Fans of The Colbert Report, you may just be fans of yourself

A recent study conducted at the The University of Ohio indicated (confirmed?) that viewers' perceptions of Colbert were heavily influenced by their own political biases.  "The Irony of Satire:  Political Ideology and the Motivation to See What You Want to See in The Colbert Report" comes with the following abstract:  

This study investigated biased message processing of political satire in The Colbert Report and the influence of political ideology on perceptions of Stephen Colbert. Results indicate that political ideology influences biased processing of ambiguous political messages and source in late-night comedy. Using data from an experiment (N = 332), we found that individual-level political ideology significantly predicted perceptions of Colbert's political ideology. Additionally, there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements. Conservatism also significantly predicted perceptions that Colbert disliked liberalism. Finally, a post hoc analysis revealed that perceptions of Colbert's political opinions fully mediated the relationship between political ideology and individual-level opinion.

The paper is available for download here, though I think the abstract does a good job of summing the  17 pages.  At least for bar talk purposes, right?  I think it'd be more interesting to find out whether Colbert is aware of his perceived function as a satirical rorschach?  Let's watch this and think about that, huh?