Glad to see that my intuition on these things is generally agreeed upon as correct.
What’s with the red, bold articles???
The easiest way would be “gangstas,” “geeks,” “academic-type people (non-nerds but they get As),” “stereotypical cookie grandma,” “stereotypical angry grandma,” “biker,” etc. You still run into some problems though, for instance, “gangstas” dont have a lot of differences in opinion on their views about sex, how to interact with people, and where to go on a date, but “geeks” vary WIDELY and they’re not even always social outcasts (or if they are, they dont feel like they are because they hang out with other geeks and didnt feel like “that guy who had no friends in HS”). Bikers (the ones and Harleys and Hondas, not the ones on Yamahas and Suzukis - from what I have seen the latter group isn’t really different then a “regular American”) will usually agree on some things, like the fact that you should physically protect your girlfriend at all costs, even if you don’t even love her yet, but diagree on other things, such as liberal vs. conservative. So some sterotype adjectives will work better then others.
Another way might be to say your location. This wouldn’t really work very well say at work, unless you work in someplace like Hot Topic or a dance club or any other place where a lot of “similar people types” hang out, but if you can say that a pheromone had better effect at a dance club (where most of the girls were grinding up against you and obviouosy looking for something for one night) then it did at the bar (where the people were mellow and a lot of them were married couples), you can sometimes make a little bit of an interpretation from that. (The parenthesis are what the poster is saying about his pheros, not me meaning clubs or bars are usually like this.) It might have a different effect at your Christain church, where, people may be very different from each other just like geeks, but if your church is incredibly conservative, maybe most people there will have certain views about what is “appropiate” or about how to interact with peopel they dont know.
The stereotype thing though is really the best I can think kof unless you really do know the personality differences between your people or groups and can describe them. Of course being able to group people like that isn’t exactly something that doesn’t happen often (menaing the second way; "the people who were shy reacted one way and the people who were outgoing reacted a different way).
Sometimes you can also see something based on race or ethnicity. For instance if someone on this board who is known to have moved to America from Korea10 years ago at the age of 35 (so he’s now 45), and is known to hang out a lot with his family and make friends throgh the Korean church, posts about how Asians reacted differently to a product then white people did, you can probably conclude that this product will have a specific, different effect on either Asians from Asia or on Koreans, because even though he is talking literally about race, the people who believe it is personality and culture rather then race will know that the Asians he hangs around with also have Asian or Korean culture.
If someone who is known to hang around with the people who are like negative black stereotypes (who do not always have balck skincolor) posts that black people reacted differently then white people, you may be able to conclude that people who act like the negative black stereotype will react that way, but black intellectuals will not (nessecerily), and neither will Africans. This paragraph may at first galnce seem offensive while the first paragraph did not. But I made a point to use an example that would seem offensive at first, because when talking about what works on who we do need to be sure we are clear. So if anyone is offended please realize that I am posting this solely to try and think of ways to catergorize; the people the example poster hangs around may be loud, speak ebonics, and be prone to hanging out in large groups. There is so such thing as a race that has these attributes, but a person who belongs to a group of people like this is more likely to mean that type of people when she refers to black people. A Mexican who doesn’t speak English is more likely to be referring to stereotypical “Latinos” who like to hang at clubs when they refer to Mexicans. Not because all Mexicans do this, or even because he specifically means to talk about just the ones who do, but because when that person hangs around with his Mexican (or black, in the first example) friends, that is the type of people they are. But if a white person refers to Mexicans, they may be talking about all of them.
If there is anyone who read my last paragraph, understands it, and is not offended, but knows of people that did get offended, can you please help me out in trying to explain it? The reason the paragraph is so long is because I am afraid people will think I am stereotyping real people no matter how much I say to show otherwise.
One important factto consider, somewhat related to what I just said about what we can interpret based on what we in some cases may know about the person posting:
The easiest way to say this would be to add a “when applicable,” but that doesn’t really explain it. I just want to make a note that America and Canada, and probably England or Holland or similar Eupropean countries, do not really have a culture for our purposes. England certainly has a different culture then America or Canada, but though one of those cultural things is being more open about both sex and swearing, the fact that the person doesn’t nessecerily mean they are open about either, and the fact thatthey came form America doesn’t nessecerily mean they aren’t. But if the person came from China you can probably say that he thinks men and women should have certain roles in the house - this may not be true of this individual but it is uniform enough that it can be used in descriptive postings. But why did I say something so obvious? Because within Aerican, Canada, or others, there are some cultures that do have views like China or India might - hippie, ghetto, or “small country town” for example (the small country town only works if they don’t have acess to "outside culture, though, since there are surprisingly just as many System of a Down fans in small Alabama towns as there are in Chicago suburbs). Hippie and ghetto have acess to outside culture, but the ghetto people usually ignore it and end up having similar ideas as the other residents if they are raised there, and hippie people - well - variation is really the entire point of it.
In some cases religions might be able to be used. Saying someone is Christian doesn’t really tell you anything about them at all. Some people just say it but don’t “feel” it (so that if Christains did have a personality these people would not have that personality), some people are conservative because they are Christain and others say the entire point of being a Christain is not to be too conservative. A Satanist or a would be the same way; since they’re only uniform belief is not to harm children there’s nothing you can say personality-wise. A Buddhist however may be more “open,” since being “open” is part of Buddhism, and someone is unlikely to say they are Buddhist if they don’t have a reason to. As far as I know that one doen’t even “run in families.” Hindis and Orthodox Greeks will have even more personality traits in common (though I’m not exactly sure what they are for those two). So in SOME cases if you can say members of a religion acted a certain way it MIGHT help.
Those are just some ideas, most of which are not very good ones, but I can’t think of anything else.
Love the title. You got a nomination coming from me 
