Our goal has always been a simple one: build powerful, genuinely usable software for behavioral research — and keep it affordable enough that no lab, anywhere in the world, gets left behind.
Empirisoft’s software was born in 1997 — not in an office, but in a psychology lab at Ohio State University. Our founder, then a Ph.D. student in Richard Petty’s lab, was frustrated by the lack of good tools for running multimedia experiments, so he built his own. The first versions of what became MediaLab, and later DirectRT, were written and running in that lab to power his own dissertation studies — research that went on to win the top dissertation award in the field, from the Society for Experimental Social Psychology. Which is to say the very first versions of these programs were already good enough for award-winning science.
They worked well enough that other researchers wanted copies. The first sale went to Duane Wegener’s lab at Purdue in 1998, and from there it spread by word of mouth. Since then, MediaLab and DirectRT have been used by thousands of researchers at hundreds of universities on six continents — and they’re still built by researchers, for researchers.
Blair Jarvis is a social and cognitive psychologist turned data scientist. He was trained in cognitive and social psychology at the University of Western Ontario (with James Olson) and earned his Ph.D. in the science of attitudes and persuasion at Ohio State University (with Richard Petty), followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania (with Martin Fishbein), studying attitude change and measurement in real-world settings.
Today his work sits where behavioral science meets machine learning: he is Director of Machine Learning & Data Science at BlackLine, and has consulted for three decades in public opinion, market analysis, product testing, and the measurement of persuasion. He has been president and owner of Empirisoft since 1998 — and the same instinct that first built these tools in a research lab still guides the software today.
— Blair Jarvis, Ph.D.
Empirisoft has moved a few times over the years — but it has always been run by researchers, and it has always stayed small on purpose.
Try MediaLab and DirectRT free for 30 days — the full software, no obligation.