In the Battle of the Coral Sea, how could two Japanese scouts grossly mis-identify two American ships?

I'd like to provide an alternative explanation that addresses the question of, "How could two independent reports contain exactly the same mistakes?", which isn't specific to this battle, but would apply here: The consequences of strict hierarchical rigidity in Japanese culture and an emphasis on conformity. This is an alternative (but not mutually exclusive) explanation to discussing the ways in which particular ships might be misidentified, as @Mark covered, or the pointing out the notion that it's in general the exception to get a scouting report exactly right as @T.E.D. mentioned.

One nice summary of analysts and historians trying to understand Japan's overall naval defeat is here, and one of the explanations is:

Japan was defeated because of strategic, logistical, and technical deficiencies over which it had very little control, because of the negative results of fallible human decision making, and because of the bureaucratic inertia found in many modern military organizations [emphasis mine]

I've been searching for sources which I've read before (but now can't find) that describe how Japanese commanders were reluctant to relay bad news and failed objectives to superiors, which hampered them learning from mistakes that were made during battle. It's not hard to imagine that the same forces were at work during the battle in question here. The battle of Coral Sea example specifically would be especially easy to rationalize along these lines if the first scout was older or higher ranking than the second scout. I'd welcome any additional sources.

Misidentifying of ships from scout planes was a consistent problem for both sides in the Pacific Theater. In fact, it seems that getting a scouting report exactly right was more the exception rather than the rule. In particular, pilots appeared to have a distinct tendency to inflate the importance (or size) of the ships they were sighting.

According to Shattered Sword, here's a small list of misidentifications that happened during the battle of Midway:

• The Destroyer Tanikaze was repeatedly identified as a light cruiser.
• The Cruisers of Japan's CruDiv 7 were identified as battleships.
• The next day two of those same two cruisers along with 3 destroyers escorting them (DesDiv 8) were identified as one battleship, one cruiser, and three destroyers. This report was then mistakenly upgraded to "one carrier and five destroyers", before being "corrected" back when the transmitting pilots landed.

Mistaking the Sims for a cruiser is easy: a Sims-class destroyer has the same number of turrets (3) as the majority of American cruisers, while most American destroyers of the time had two, four, or five turrets. Without anything to provide a sense of scale, it's easy to mistake one for the other, particularly if you're not getting close enough to count the guns in each turret.

Mistaking the Neosho for a carrier is harder, but still understandable: the Cimarron-class fleet oilers have a large structure in the middle of a mostly-flat deck, a layout that at a glance is similar to the island and flight deck of a carrier.

If you're out looking for the enemy fleet, you're expecting to find carriers sailing in the company of cruisers. In psychology, this is called priming, and as long as the ships you're seeing aren't too different from the ones you expect to see, it's nearly certain that you'll misidentify them.

Spotting three destroyers that don't exist is harder to explain, but again, priming plays a role. A cruiser and carrier will not be operating alone, so when you're looking for the rest of their escorts, there's a decent chance that you'll misidentify a dark patch of ocean, the interference pattern between the two ships' wakes, or other things as poorly-seen destroyers.