Social Love, Trust and Pro Environmental Attitudes and Behaviours

Relational good, both a fundamental aspect of a community's well-being and of an individual's quality of life, requires the commitment of the single individual and the relational role played by others (Portela et al., 2013). The relational good thus affects the behaviour and propensities of individuals towards others and it is determined by several factors, such as trust.The presented research aims to understand the interactions between the propensity to engage in loving behaviour considering trust towards others. This interaction refers to environmental behaviour to observe how trust and social love can interact in producing pro environmental attitudes and behaviours which are examined as an element of the public sphere. To achieve this cognitive aim, the results of a questionnaire previously used as part of a larger research program dedicated to Social Love were adopted. In particular, the questionnaire was administered to a wide range of respondents throughout Italy to investigate Italians' propensity for loving behavior.The first phase of the research involved the construction of a social love index, with which the respondents' disposition to have loving behaviors in their daily lives (Cataldi e Iorio, 2023). Instead, the second phase of the analysis was dedicated to the theme of trust. The topic was divided into three dimensions, and an index was constructed for each of the three dimensions. More specifically, these dimensions concern trust towards the generalised other, mistrust and distrust towards specific categories of people, for example, people with a different ethnicity or religion. In the end, the aim is to understand the relationship between love behaviour, the three dimensions of trust, mistrust, and distrust, and how this relationship affects pro behaviour towards the environment.