In U.S. prisons today, more than twenty-five thousand inmates are serving their time in solitary confinement—removed from the general prison population, isolated in small cells with little human contact (Casella & Ridgeway, 2012). Some activists worry about the harshness of the measure. They hold that human beings form and maintain relationships in order to satisfy basic personal and social needs—companionship, stimulation, meeting goals—and it is cruel to deny those needs (Ramirez, Sunnafrank, & Goei, 2010). Proponents argue that it is this very denial of these needs that makes such punishment effective. In any case, these personal and social needs are key factors for all of us in the relationships we form with others.