The questions seem asymmetric. Surely, you can't compare "being confident in..." with "believing". Seems to me that they're trying to make it more dramatic than it is?
What's going to get you more hits on your site?
"Americans widely believe in the paranormal"
or
"Americans have tepid skepticism about the supernatural"
"7 in 10 Americans believe someone can change the contents of these graphs by thinkin' real hard."
Humans tend to only focus on and remember instances where their ideas turned out to be true (or seem to), and we'd rather have a dumb explanation than none at all. Then again, evolution, the current explanation for the birth of the universe, and global warming all have plenty of evidence but still aren't believed by as many. Maybe people are just a bunch of sh**theads.
