ABSTRACT
Individual action in the public sphere is a response to the way information is communicated and interpreted. While the action might be, or feel, spontaneous, the information that caused it is not spontaneously generated. Individual complexity is typically accompanied by escalating desire to supply or receive information, and public relations (PR) has flourished because of it. PR is used in this way so organizations can use individual complexity efficiently. Social complexity owes something to the ways managed public communication encourages dispassionate individual reasoning to make organizations more efficient. In complex societies individuality is a boon and an inconvenience to PR. The human mind's intensely, persistently and stubbornly individual features of consciousness and self-knowledge complicate PR's work. PR's impact on the mind depends on the relationship between mind and brain, specifically between sensation and reaction. PR is something beyond a provider of suitable stimuli to prompt individual biology into action.
