Five studies (total valid N = 834) examined whether objectification (i.e., being treated as a tool or an object to achieve others’ goals) reduces people’s perceived authenticity and subjective well‐being. Participants who experienced more objectification (Studies 1a and 1b), imagined being objectified (Study 2), or recalled a past objectification experience (Study 3) felt less authentic and reported lower levels of subjective well‐being than their counterparts. Moreover, perceived authenticity mediated the link between objectification and subjective well‐being (Studies 1a–3). In addition, offering objectified participants an opportunity to restore authenticity could enhance their well‐being (Study 4). Taken together, our findings highlight the crucial role of authenticity in understanding when and why objectification decreases subjective well‐being and how to ameliorate this relationship. Our findings also imply the effect of authenticity in understanding various psychological outcomes following objectification.

Economic inequality has been shown to increase the social distance between people. However, we proposed that people's affiliation with others in more unequal societies depends on whether the relationship is instrumental to self‐enhancement goals. The results from four experiments (total N = 823) supported our proposition. We found that economic inequality increased people's focus on the instrumental aspects of relationships (Experiment 1). In the workplace, economic inequality prompted people to choose colleagues who were instrumental in achieving their performance goals as partners (Experiment 2). Moreover, the effect could be extended to situations where there is no clear benefit. Specifically, participants in high‐inequality contexts tended to approach social targets of instrumental value more than those in low‐inequality contexts, and the effect was driven by self‐enhancement goals (Experiments 3–4). Taken together, our findings suggest that economic inequality encourages instrumental orientation in social interactions, which changes how people view relationships and interact with others.

Assessing shy symptoms via computerized adaptive testing (CAT) provides greater measurement precision coupled with a lower test burden compared to conventional tests. The computerized adaptive test for shyness (CAT-Shyness) was developed based on a large sample of 1400 participants from China. Item bank development included the investigation of unidimensionality, local independence, and exploration of differential item functioning (DIF). CAT simulations based on the real data were carried out to investigate the reliability, validity, and predicted utility (sensitivity and specificity) of the CAT-Shyness. The CAT-Shyness item bank was successfully built and proved to have excellent psychometric properties: high content validity, unidimensionality, local independence, and no DIF. The CAT simulations needed 14 items to achieve a high measurement precision with a reliability of .9. Moreover, the results revealed that the proposed CAT-Shyness had acceptable and reasonable marginal reliability, criterion-related validity, and sensitivity and specificity. It not only had acceptable psychometric properties, but also had a shorter but efficient assessment of shyness, which can save significant test time and reduce the test burden for individuals with less information loss.