  The recently measured centrality dependence of high energy jets in
proton-lead collisions at the LHC is investigated. We hypothesize that events
with jets of very high energy (a few hundred GeV) are characterized by a
suppressed number of soft particles, thus shifting these events into more
peripheral bins. This naturally results in the suppression (enhancement) of the
nuclear modification factor, $R_{pA}$, in central (peripheral) collisions. Our
calculations suggest that a moderate suppression of the order of $20\%$, for
$10^{3}$ GeV jets, can quantitatively reproduce the experimental data. We
further extract the suppression factor as a function of jet energy and test our
conjecture using available $R_{pA}$ data for various centralities.
