He then moved to the University of California, San Diego, where he was professor of Anthropology until 2003 and served as department chair for three separate terms.
His research interests ranged widely, including African-American family structure, personality, color perception, and mathematical models for reconstructing mitochondrial lineages.
[2] One problem that D'Andrade addressed was the challenge of conceptualizing how people reason in their culturally situated worlds.
In one set of studies, individuals may do very poorly on abstract tests of formal logic or mathematics, but are quite capable of reasoning accurately and quickly about real-world situations with which they are familiar, and which under formal logic are ostensibly the same task.
The first has to do with content: the greater the familiarity and the richer the relevant schemata which are available, the more readily can one solve a problem.