  Collisions of small systems at RHIC exhibit a significant suppression of the
nuclear modification factor $R_{xA}$ of jets and high momentum neutral pions in
events with large event activity. This suppression is accompanied by an
enhancement of $R_{xA}$ in events with low event activity. Since event activity
is commonly interpreted as a measure of the centrality of the collisions, these
results call into question any interpretation of the suppression in central
collisions that invokes energy loss in a QGP produced small systems. In this
talk, we will compare prompt photon to $\pi^0$ production measured by PHENIX in
d+Au collision at $\sqrt{s}=200\,GeV$ to demonstrate that the apparent
centrality dependence is not related to a nuclear modification of hard
scattering processes, but likely due to deviations from the proportionality of
event activity and centrality in the underlying standard Glauber model
calculations. Furthermore, we will use prompt photon production in d+Au
relative to p+p collisions to empirically determine the effective number of
binary collisions $N_{coll}$ of a given event sample. We find that for all
event selections, except for those with the highest event activity, $R_{xA}$ of
$\pi^0$ is consistent with unity. By comparing p+Au and d+Au collisions, we
will investigate the significance of the remaining suppression of high $p_{T}$
$\pi^0$ production in events with high event activity.
