Isaac Michael "Zick" Rubin (born 1944) is an American social psychologist, lawyer, and author. He is "widely credited as the author of the first empirical measurement of love," for his work distinguishing feelings of like from feelings of love via Rubin's Scales of Liking and Loving. Science Progress stated, "The major breakthrough in research on love came from the pioneer psychometric work of Zick Rubin." He has also published on disclosing to consequential strangers. According to The Cambridge Handbook of Personal Relationships, Rubin "conducted influential early studies on disclosure reciprocity in naturalistic settings, such as in airport departure lounges and at bus stops." His work also examined the development of friendship among toddlers. Life and education Rubin earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University in 1965 and a Ph.D. from University of Michigan in 1969. In the 1980s, Rubin entered Harvard Law School, earning his J.D. degree and being admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1988. In the 2001 edition of The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology, Rubin was listed as having died in 1997. In 2011 he wrote a New York Times op-ed about his attempts to correct the error after it had been repeated in a Wikia profile about him. Career Social psychology Rubin won the Socio-psychological Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1969. He was director of the Boston Couples Study, described by the Encyclopedia of Human Relationships as "a pioneering longitudinal study" that integrated multiple research methods as it followed the development of relationships over time. Rubin taught at Harvard University from 1967 to 1976 and was the Louis and Frances Salvage Professor of Social Psychology at Brandeis University from 1977 to 1985 before entering law school. Rubin defended tax-funded work on love after Senator William Proxmire criticized the use of National Science Foundation funding on studies of love at Harvard, the University of Minnesota, and University of Wisconsin. In 1975, Proxmire had named psychologist Ellen Berscheid of University of Minnesota as recipient of his first Golden Fleece Award for her work on love. Proxmire called it "a futile and wasteful attempt to explain the impossible." Rubin defended his colleagues, saying Proxmire was "taking advantage of the fact that it is easy to trivialize and sensationalize such matters as these." Rubin sued Boston Magazine for copyright infringement after they copied the questions from his liking and loving scales without permission