Samenvatting

High-impact incidents, such as (natural) disasters, severe (traffic) accidents, and exposure to (war) violence, may have severe psychological consequences, both for direct and indirect victims. Such consequences may qualify for financial compensation. However, some victims malinger their psychological status to get compensated for damages they have not suffered. This type of fraudulent behavior costs insurance companies and publicly funded compensation services enormous amounts of money and may eventually make compensation unaffordable. To prevent this from occurring, it is argued that lawyers who need to decide upon victims’ claims for compensation should call in independent experts to evaluate the genuineness of victims’ reported psychological symptoms by administrating a malingering detection test. To enable correct interpretation of the outcome of such a test, the base rate problem is extensively discussed. In short, this problem means that correct test interpretation in individual cases depends on the prevalence of malingering in the population to which a victim belongs. Finally, several counter arguments for the standard assessment of malingering by independent experts are discussed.