SAN DIEGO -- Social pressure plays a key role in getting smokers to break the habit, a newly released University of California, San Diego study concludes.

Using data from three previous tobacco studies conducted in California, researchers at UCSD found that smokers are far more likely to try to quit when living in areas where smoking is not socially acceptable.

"People say they don't want to conform, but in reality, the desire to conform is strong," said Shu-Hong Zhu, the study's principal investigator at the Cancer Prevention and Control Program at Moores UCSD Cancer Center.

Zhu's team looked at smokers who are recent immigrants to California from China and Korea, where smoking is still widely accepted.

They found that the California immigrants have a smoking cessation rate much higher than their counterparts in China and Korea, where about two-thirds of all men smoke.

In comparison, most Californians see smoking as socially unacceptable, according to the UCSD researchers, who noted the state also has one of the highest smoking cessation rates in the nation.

The study was published in a recent edition of Nicotine and Tobacco Research.