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Background: The effectiveness of early prevention programmes and their viability as a public policy option have increasingly caught the attention of scholars and policymakers. Given the implementation costs of such programmes, it is important to assess whether they achieved anticipated objectives and whether they made efficient use of taxpayer money. Aim: To discuss the social and economic impact of a 2‐year randomised intervention aimed to improve social skills and self‐control (i.e., non‐cognitive skills) among disruptive boys from low‐income neighbourhoods in Montreal. Method: We review findings from published studies documenting the impact of the intervention at different stages of the life course, as well as its cost‐effectiveness and cost‐benefit. Results: The intervention improved behavioural indicators throughout adolescence and eventually led to greater high school graduation rates, reduced crime, and better labour market outcomes in adulthood. Importantly, the prevention programme generated considerable returns to taxpayer investments. Conclusion: Findings from the Montreal Longitudinal Experimental Study have been well‐received and have contributed to an early prevention 'awakening' in Quebec and elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social trust is at the center of democratic societies, but it varies considerably between individuals and cultures. Socioeconomic status has been identified as an important predictor of such variability. Although this association has mostly been reported for measures of socioeconomic status taken in adulthood, recent studies have found unique effects of harsh conditions experienced during childhood on social trust assessed decades later. Here, we report a series of three studies that provide further support for the importance of early childhood conditions in social trust. The first study revealed that higher childhood socioeconomic status was associated with greater social trust in a diverse sample of French participants (N = 915), even after adjusting for current socioeconomic status. The second study confirmed this result using data from the European Values Survey (N = 64,780, 45 countries). In both samples, our analyses revealed that adding childhood socioeconomic status significantly improved the fit of the model thereby providing suggestive evidence of the central role of this variable for explaining variations in social trust. Finally, the last study replicated this association using a behavioral measure of social trust (N = 60 in original study, N = 75 in replication study). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]