Confirmation bias is likely to be especially pronounced in satire because one of the things about satire — especially the deadpan, bald-eagle satire of Colbert — is that it is chock-full of ambiguity and uncertainty. This leaves lots of opportunities for a viewer to fill in the blanks — a kind of choose-your-own-truthiness, if you will.

"The nature of satire, when you boil it down, is that messages are to varying degrees implied messages," explained Lance Holbert, a professor of communications at The Ohio State University who studies the intersection of entertainment and politics. "It requires the audience to fill in the gap, to get the joke. And it requires a certain bit of knowledge to fill in the gap. ... Certain types of humor are much more explicit. In satire the humor is very complex."

LaMarre got interested in the question of how audiences interpret Colbert back in 2007, when she started puzzling over how several appearances by Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckab

I love Colbert and no one has ever come close to calling me conservative.

It's because they can't tell the difference between news and satire (which may be why it's not the Fox Comedy Channel).