I'm sympathetic to this line of reasoning, but not entirely convinced of it. People raised in more abusive environments do seem to come out different from people raised in less abusive environments, for at least some spreads, and it's not clear to me that their result is improved by being kept unaware of people who are better off. Though it might be.
Did a medieval townsman behave as though he/she was protected from the bad things that could happen any less than a modern middle-class person (whether religious or not)? I don't think so.
Foie gras, the delicacy made from the liver of a very fat goose (or sometimes duck), is believed to be unethical and is therefore frequently banned. For a long time, it was believed that the only way to properly fatten a goose is to continually force-feed it through a tube over several weeks, which is probably a highly unpleasant experience, although it's difficult to tell. Recently, Spanish farmer Eduardo Sousa revealed that under highly specific conditions, you can get geese to fatten themselves voluntarily.
Geese will instinctively gorge themselves when winter is coming on. Eat a goose right after it's fattened itself up for the winter, and you get a delicious treat that died happy. The problem is that geese will only do this if they believe food may become scarce during the winter (or their instinct to gorge only kicks in when the environment is such that that would be a reasonable inference; it's not clear whether it's the goose or evolution doing the analysis). If they realize that food will remain available during the winter, they eat normally. And there are quite a few possible clues--farmers trying to replicate Sousa's setup have discovered that cheating on any part leads to unfatted livers.