Studying citizens' trust to monitor measures acceptance during COVID-19 pandemic.

Over the last year, the COVID-19 pandemic has strongly affected everyone’s lives. An unprecedented situation, which required enormous sacrifices and very stringent limitations. Within this context, trust has played a crucial role: people decided to trust their institutions to tackle the pandemic and that trust made the strong restrictive measures effective. This work aims to study the response of the Italian population to the early stages of the pandemic. Making use of a survey addressed to 4260 Italian citizens, we realized an agent-based simulation to model and analyze citizen trust starting from its main cognitive sub-components, with particular reference to the dimensions of competence and willingness. The results of this work can be of great interest, both for understanding what happened in the past, but also for designing effective strategies in the future.