laddering

ploughings and ladderings

With upward laddering like this, you're going from the bottom of the hierarchy up towards the top, and what you'll typically find is that as you go up the number of branches decreases, so you'll keep hitting the same responses and the same high level goals and values eventually, more or less regardless of where you started from.

For example, tobacco cell cultures grown at 5oC, resulted in a loss of viability relative to control cells and exhibited DNA laddering (Koukalova et al., 1997).