Conservation and restoration actions have become increasingly critical tools to deal with the threats climate change and environmental degradation pose to ecosystems and the services they support. In trying to encourage pro-environmental behaviour and support for environmental action in society, managers and researchers regularly turn to knowledge-based education programs. However, the exact nature of the link between knowledge and actions is still uncertain with conflicting evidence of the predictive ability of environmental knowledge on amount of pro-environmental behaviour. Discrepancies in results may, in part, be due to different types of knowledge or methods of conceptualising and measuring environmental knowledge. The usefulness of environmental education campaigns may therefore depend on understanding the subtleties of how knowledge influences behaviour. Our results indicate managers may not wish to use objective knowledge metrics to assess the success of education campaigns attempting to change pro-environmental beliefs and behaviours. Instead, managers may wish to assess the subjective beliefs of anglers to ascertain how likely they are to engage with conservation actions. When creating educational campaigns, managers can focus messaging on short and understandable messages highlighting the risks of environmental threats and the benefits of conservation actions without bombarding individuals with statistics.