In recent weeks, there has been a call for increased research on COVID-19 due to its drastic health, social, and economic impacts (e.g., Sohrabi et al., 2020; Anderson et al., 2020; McKibbin & Fernando, 2020). The current research climate around the coronavirus is predominately focused on medical and health-related interventions and in the behavioural sciences specifically, attempts to understand and ‘nudge’ public behaviours in-line with government recommendations (e.g., social distancing). To date, research has yet to study moral decision-making in the time of COVID-19. This is an important area of research as significant (and global) changes in social structures and community practises are likely to affect people’s beliefs about what is now ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ but also the moral principles that guide their decision-making. For example, with many individuals now in government ‘lockdowns’ to protect their own and other’s health, people are being reminded that, now more than ever, we must act for the greater good (a characteristically utilitarian ideal). Additionally, medical professionals now find themselves making regular and distressing triage decisions which involve prioritising some lives over others (e.g., Rosenbaum, 2020). These issues are at the core of moral psychology. This project will collect data about people’s current behaviours, their moral judgments, and the extent to which they have ‘moralised’ behaviours associated with the pandemic (e.g., the extent to which they express opinions about them in terms of right and wrong). Participants will be recruited from a previous study sample (ethics ref number: E747 (University of Bradford), 2019-013 (University of Reading)) as this will allow us to investigate how moral principles at baseline relate to behaviours, moral decision-making and moralisation during a socially and ethically relevant crisis. We plan to run an online experiment in which we present a series of moral dilemmas, a moralisation measure, and a measure of current behaviour. Participants will be invited to participate through Prolific, an online participant database using an online experiment platform. Participants will be asked to answer questions relating to moral dilemmas as well as their current beliefs and behaviours surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. All answers will be either "yes"/"no" or in the form of a Likert-type scale (e.g. for moralisation, participants will answer questions on a scale from 0 - not wrong at all; a perfectly OK action to 6 - very wrong; an extremely immoral action) (Appendix 1). We aim to: 1) Determine if the current climate has influenced people’s moral decisions; are people more likely to be utilitarian during the current crisis than they were prior to the pandemic. 2) Determine if people’s moral principles (e.g., their endorsement of utilitarian principles) predict what behaviours they are currently engaging in (i.e., social distancing, resisting the temptation to hoard, and volunteering) and whether they view violations of government-recommended behaviours as moral violations. The results from this research project will provide important insights. Not only will we have 1) a record of behaviours that individuals are currently engaging in, but we will also have 2) a clearer understanding of how people think ‘morally’ about these behaviours. Understanding whether people have added moral weight to behaviours such as social distancing and hoarding, could help to shape public messaging campaigns or ‘nudge’ interventions, making them more likely to be successful in changing behaviour. Experimental materials are available at https://app.gorilla.sc/openmaterials/250269 References Anderson, R. M., Heesterbeek, H., Klinkenberg, D., & Hollingsworth, T. D. (2020). How will country-based mitigation measures influence the course of the COVID-19 epidemic?. The Lancet, 395(10228), 931-934. McKibbin, W. J., & Fernando, R. (2020). The global macroeconomic impacts of COVID-19: Seven scenarios [working paper] Rosenbaum, L. (2020). Facing covid-19 in Italy—ethics, logistics, and therapeutics on the epidemic’s front line. New England Journal of Medicine. Sohrabi, C., Alsafi, Z., O’Neill, N., Khan, M., Kerwan, A., Al-Jabir, A., ... & Agha, R. (2020). World Health Organization declares global emergency: A review of the 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19). International Journal of Surgery.