This approach may be seriously misleading, however, and there is a very different (and increasingly popular) view within political psychology that challenges the view that emotional processes are inherently irrational or non-cognitive in nature. It is certainly true to say that hot cognitions often compete with cold ones. Anyone who has tried to lose weight knows that going on a diet is like warring with oneself, logic telling us that we should avoid purchasing chocolate bars and ice cream, appetite (or perhaps plain greed) dictating the opposite. As Steven Pinker points out, "mental life often feels like a parliament within. Thoughts and feelings vie for control as if each were an agent with strategies for taking over the whole person, you."10 We are all familiar with the damage that unbridled emotion-especially highly negative affect states such as anger-can do. Nevertheless, emotions are not necessarily something which should be regarded as detrimental, he argues. Combining a modern cognitive approach with a Darwinian evolutionary approach, Pinker contends that we have emotions because they have proven useful in propagating the species.