I wish the creator had linked the survey used as I would be curious as to the demographics and number of persons.

I have been to a couple of these locations and the feeling I got was pretty much that the larger the size of the urban area and the higher the population, the ruder people might have seemed.

I get the feeling that in places with large numbers of people, the people there lose a real sense of community that you can find in smaller populations. There is so much infrastructure in these locations and so many municipal services that you rarely have to depend on someone personally, because there is generally no need to.

Meanwhile when you live out in the sticks where you might have 3 neighbors within 100 km, when shit hits the fan, these people depend on you, and you depend on them to help each other out because otherwise there is a pretty good chance you're fucked. If your house floods or something, there is no nearby hotel to stay at. The one plumber in a nearby town is not around on weekends and even if they were, it would still take them an hour or more to get to you. So what you have instead is a neighbor who might know some stuff about plumbing, who will let you sleep on their couch while you work together to solve the problem.

This makes you a part of something more than yourself, and gives you a view into the power of people working together, and I think that generally this results in being more open to being kind to each other, because you never know when one of you might need a favor from the other. Also by doing this over a period of time, the work you put into this invests you in the lives of others directly, so you care more about other people. This does not seem to happen as much when you have 30,000 neighbors.

Not saying this is always the case either, small towns can also be backwards and hostile as fuck to "outsiders", but it hasn't generally been my experience.

Please take note that this entire comment is, of course, anecdotal.