A study on the irony of satire (or why conservatives fall for Colbert’s act)

Just yesterday, I wondered why so many fundies (and generally dumb people) seemed to fail to realize that Stephen Colbert’s caricaturization of a right-wing kook was just that: a caricature? Well, it seems we now have an answer. Linked to in the comments at Pastor T.Estes’ blog (yes, it allows comments now), was this interesting little study:

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. [My emphasis]

In other words: many conservatives are idiots who are unable to recognize satire, whilst liberals, well, actually can recognize a farce when they see one.

Which again reminds me of that good ol’ quote about not all conservatives being idiots, yet that most idiots do tend to be conservatives. This does include the religious, of course.